iPages question
By MMelhus at Wed, May 17 2006 9:50am |
Greetings,
I'm writing my thesis now, and was wondering if the science users out there with experience with iPages
have any insights as to how to do paper citations. I'm currently using endnotes, but the display format
is with a superscript, not enclosed in square brackets, and it can't seem to handle [1-4], for example.
Also, I don't know if I'll be able to use a citation again, and may have to manually add second citations
(and manually edit them as well - that's the rub.)
Any advice on how to do this better? Or am I a moron for using iPages, and should do the whole thing
in TeX?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Martin
iPapers?
Are you talking about Apple Pages or iPapers?
iPapers
I use iPapers and I think it's much better than endnote. The interface is easier. It depends on what type of citations you use (APA formatting), but you can send iPapers files to a text document and edit it as you go. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the cite as you write feature of end note, so you have to manually import your entries, but I find it more user friendly when compiling references.
Apple's Pages was meant for
Apple's Pages was meant for short, graphic intesive tasks, such as brochures and newsletters. I think it would be risky to invest in this program for a large document with many sections. Endnote is designed to go with Word, and it works pretty well. I don't like Word much as a wordprocessor but they killed the competitors for this end of the market (large, complex document creation). I can't give an opinion on LaTex; I haven't got the time to learn or use it.
I certainly sympathize with
I certainly sympathize with your experiences. I was an EndNote captive for quite some time. While it has been very useful in the past, more recent releases have really been quite poor. I would say that it is worrisome when there are never any updates for the Mac version.
From what I have read, I would echo previous comments that I am not sure that Pages was meant for thesis work.
Having said that, I think that the viable word processors for the work that you want to do are Mellel and MS Word. I have also read a bit about LaTex. However, I personally am not up for the level of semi-coding necessary. I use Word 2004 primarily because it is fairly seamless when collaborating with Windows users. I think that Mellel is pretty good, I think using the RTF format. But I am not sure if commenting and tracking changes works.
As for my woes with EndNote, the final straw was when EndNote 9 would not integrate with Word 2004. Not matter how many installs, calls to tech support, searching different support forums, it would never work. This forced me to seek alternates. BookEndz and Sente. I eventually settled on Sente. The search function is more similar to what I am use to with EndNotes. But more than that, Sente's ability to organize citations, link files etc is more complete and user friendly than either EndNotes or BookEnds.
Try Bookends with Word 2004
I used Word 2004 for my dissertation with Bookends for my reference manager. It doesn't have quite the feature set of EndNote, but it just simply works, and works well. I haven't had it cause any problems with Word and it hasn't crashed itself or anything like that...
Pages is not meant for something like a thesis; you should use Word, or you could try Mellel, which integrates beautifully with Bookends. I have a copy of it, but never really have used it; I got it simply because it came as a package with Bookends and I thought I'd try it. It has a lot of features, but it has an unusual work flow that I'm not used to, and I'm not interested in learning another word processor right now.
Eventually I'll transition to LaTex with something like TexShop or iTeXMac.
What happend to my comment?
I posted a comment on this thread a week ago. It was marked as possible spam. The reason might have been, that I inluded a link. (In this case to CTAN's homepage, a well-known TeX resource page).
I was just wondering what happend to this comment, as it was not spam (at least that was not the intention, but I guess any opinion can be regarded as spam to others;-)
Have a nice weekend!
iPages / MS-Word/ LaTex for large documents
I used LaTex (TeXShop as frontend) recently for my PhD. I had some expirience with LaTex in the past (not to much). There are lots of templates for a thesis around, so the learning curve should not be to steep.
I didn't had crashes however I wouldn't use LaTex again for a large document. Problems will start when you have to edit your document again (eg making corrections demanded by the examiners). Finding the text is a pain. In adition, you can't send a LaTex document to someone who is not used to it (and outside Physics, most people aren't).
I wrote my MD ten years ago in FrameMaker, but this option is gone a long time ago on the Mac site, but I believe you could install Windows + FrameMaker under Parallels.
Otherwise I would go woth Word + a good template file.
Separate table of content
I'm trying to figure out how to make separate table of contents (TOCs) in Ipages. Does anybody know?
kind regards,
Lovisa
zotero firefox and openoffice
If you can live with using openoffice, zotero makes a plugin for firefox (which handles the refs) and a plugin for openoffice that does citations and bibliography. Everything is free. However if you want to use MS word zotero makes a plugin for that too.