# Successful Report Writing
academic, technological @ 17 February 2009
I’ve started using the following setting for my university report writings, and I highly recommend it!:
- For finding articles and books: Google Books, Google Scholar and CiteseerX
- Zotero, a firefox plugin for Bibliography Management. Which includes the ability to sponge bibliographic data from all of the above and many of the article repositories on the web (and Amazon.co.uk books category ).
- BibTeX, which is a bibliographic format that can be exported from Zotero.
- LaTeX, which is a document markup language which is reasonably similar (although in some ways simpler, in other ways more complex than) HTML. LaTeX can also work with BibTeX, by using unique identifiers, LaTeX has the ability to give a code, pull data out of the BibTeX file and provide precise styling for the document that you are referencing.
Absolutely amazing. I highly suggest using all of the above. I also use something called Kile which is an “Integrated LaTeX Environment” for Linux (it was made specifically for KDE, but I use it through Gnome).
I’ve dabbled with LaTeX in the past, but it just didn’t really work for me until recently. So please, if you do write articles, then try out LaTeX if you haven’t already!
UPDATE - Friday 20th February 2009
I’ve given up on Kile, as it doesn’t seem to work on my Laptop. I’m now using Texmaker. Which is cross-platform, and seems a lot more responsive than Kile.
