How best to procrastinate and learn LaTeX?

Question

Slightly tongue-in-cheek this one but written in good faith...

I am a competent user of LaTeX and use it with Eclipse as IDE, MacTexlive as install, and XeTeX as engine to author my PhD.

However, there are times when I like to procrastinate and love LaTeX as an end in itself not just as a means to an end. What would you recommend as a good way of procrastinating whilst usefully extending my capabilities and abilities to use LaTeX?

In the past SVN, biber and beamer have served to distract me from my thesis. Any more potentially fruitful areas?

Try to answer questions on this site! I find that the best way to learn about a wide range of issues, and get really good, constructive and quick feedback from experienced users. — Jake, Jan 30 '13 at 18:38
Of course there are :D Try TikZ/pgf. You can create great graphics for your Phd while procrastinating ;-) Also there are over 700 pages of manual you can read. — Dave, Jan 30 '13 at 18:38
Ah, philosophy of education thesis. 80K words and no pictures. — DGarside, Jan 30 '13 at 18:39
There's always the memoir and the biblatex manuals you can read in your spare time. Then you can try all of the features they provide and you don't really need :) — ienissei, Jan 30 '13 at 18:51
study and try to understand the questions tagged with expansion — cmhughes, Jan 30 '13 at 19:17
Just don't do it. Get out into nature and take some fresh air. And then back to your real project :-) — Daniel, Jan 30 '13 at 20:02
Rewrite your university's thesis format into a proper LaTeX class. That's a tougher task in the U.S. than elsewhere, but still worthwhile. — Mike Renfro, Jan 30 '13 at 20:07
After you've plowed through the memoir and biblatex reference guides and the entire LaTeX3 project documentation, turn to LuaTeX and LuaLaTeX and its manuals. :-) — Mico, Jan 30 '13 at 20:44
I had never used LaTeX until my thesis but wanted to learn it and it was a perfect opportunity. You have perfectly articulated why I probably would finish faster if I used notepad++ instead... — enderland, Jan 31 '13 at 00:50
As you are asking for other fruitful areas for procrastination: Consider switch from SVN to git or Mercurial. — matth, Jan 31 '13 at 13:15

score 33 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 30 '13 at 18:50

33

You probably had some customization in your thesis. Try to make a package of your code, publish it on CTAN and then support it, answering users' requests.

This will definitely help you to learn TeX and to procraste in your other activity.

At least this advice works for me.

answered Jan 30 '13 at 18:50

Boris

38,129

You're right; previous answers have helped me customise my bibliography and provide word counts for specific sections of text without detexing and/or parsing through some other external program. – DGarside Jan 30 '13 at 19:14

score 28 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 30 '13 at 20:40

28

Get yourself a book on typography, e.g. The Elements of Typographic Style, and try to improve your thesis. Be critical about the things mentioned, and try to implement the things you'd like to see in your thesis.

answered Jan 30 '13 at 20:40

Psirus

5,835

score 12 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 31 '13 at 12:19

12

I found that learning TikZ a wonderful way of expanding my knowledge of Latex and vector graphics. It also had the handy side affect that the diagrams and charts in my masters project report looked beautiful.

answered Jan 31 '13 at 12:19

imp25

221
1
3

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 31 '13 at 08:21

comb through the package library and grab all those packages involving typography, lines/shapes, layout, displaystyle, formatting, etc...

Also, you can \define and \redefine as many things as possible. It makes proof readers of your tex file want to strangle you with all the new definitions and packages to install. :p

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 06 '13 at 04:13

1

... as I relished the post I immediately thought of (1) TikZ/PGF, closely followed by (2) LaTeX3, then noticed with little surprise that both topics had already been suggested. Time consuming they may be, time wasters they are not!

answered Feb 06 '13 at 04:13

Reinhard Neuwirth

3,329

How best to procrastinate and learn LaTeX?

5 Answers5