Science Geek Wife Switches to Mac

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Well, after many years of gentle prodding (and after managing to switch other family members) I finally convinced my wife to switch to the Mac (which was not easy, mind you!) but this has led me to some instances where I could use a little help from more knowledgable Mac users



Background: Barring a brief stint on a mac during the OS 7 hay-day, she is truly a Unix user having spent many years on Sparc Stations running various versions of Solaris. Much to her dismay she has, as of late, had to move to the world of Windows (and what's worse Windows NT and Windows 98 ) in a University that refuses to support any other computing platform and tut-tuts the use of any Windows operating system other than NT. After much frustration with this and after me showing her/attempting to sell the Unix underpinning of OS X she has decided to move to a Mac and has just purchased a 1GHz Titanium Superdrive with 1GB of RAM -- Sweeeet!



Now, the key to her happiness on the Mac is getting it to do many of the things that she used to do on her Sparc Stations (as well as having it work compatibly with the Windows environment around her). After a little wrangling I have managed to get the new version of Matlab installed and that seems to be up and running well. Although I would rather it run under Apple's new X11 beta rather than OrobourosX and XDarwin... but that can wait for now.



I guess the main question I have at the moment is: What is the easiest way to use LaTeX and BibTeX on Mac OS X? Is there anyone working with LaTeX or BibTeX that can share their user experiences?



Note: my background is almost entirely with the mac (I can't really count those years using a Commodore 64 or DOS now can I?) and so my knowledge of the command line, etc is minimal but hopefully improving!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 12
    aquafireaquafire Posts: 2,758member
    I don't have an answer for you, but just wanted to join into the celebrations over your wife's conversion on the way to Mac ...



    My X partner (a marine Biologist ) swore that Pc was heaven, she rubbished all things Mac till I showed how easy it was for her to store files, collect images, create Mpegs, etc etc etc all the sorts of stuff she needed for PR work....

    She still uses Pc "officially" like most Universities ..but makes any old excuse to come over and use my Macs to do the "core" stuff..of her research & PR material......
  • Reply 2 of 12
    I don't currently use either but I am trying to maximise my use of Mac OS X's unix underpinnings and I was reading about TeX etc. the other day so:



    I think you want TeXShop, which is an OS X-ized distribution. It's a Cocoa app and it is designed to produce PDF's as that is a native format on Mac OS X:

    http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html



    And for all the info in the world (including other versions of TeX for Mac OS X) go here:

    http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
  • Reply 3 of 12
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    I used fink to get LaTeX and well I haven't gotten BibTeX yet. Make sure you have the X win SDK installed, fink will look for it.





    You wanna blow her away? Show her this.





    God what kind of woman did you find that uses Matlab, LaTeX and BibTeX? Does she have a sister? Oh wait I'm married.



    LaTeX works fine but I have the crappy fonts. The ones that look like shit on screen.
  • Reply 4 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by aquafire

    I don't have an answer for you, but just wanted to join into the celebrations over your wife's conversion on the way to Mac ...



    My X partner (a marine Biologist ) swore that Pc was heaven, she rubbished all things Mac till I showed how easy it was for her to store files, collect images, create Mpegs, etc etc etc all the sorts of stuff she needed for PR work....

    She still uses Pc "officially" like most Universities ..but makes any old excuse to come over and use my Macs to do the "core" stuff..of her research & PR material......




    Welcome to the party! well I have to admit it took some time to get her to consider a Mac as guis have been a no-no for her with her command line background! But I'm sure she will eventually come to love and appreciate the mac interface with a little time... but, yes, she too is stuck with the official PC stance of the university who are even nervous of having the powerbook hooked up to the network for fear of what might happen!
  • Reply 5 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by stupider...likeafox

    I think you want TeXShop, which is an OS X-ized distribution. It's a Cocoa app and it is designed to produce PDF's as that is a native format on Mac OS X:

    http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html



    And for all the info in the world (including other versions of TeX for Mac OS X) go here:

    http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/




    Thanks for these links I am trying to read through them but they are rather heavy for my newbie brain when it comes to these matters. I will have to get my wife to look through them properly a bit later and then see what she thinks. The second link looks like it may be the most useful as it seems to gather a lot of information and approaches for doing this together in one page.
  • Reply 6 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Scott

    I used fink to get LaTeX and well I haven't gotten BibTeX yet. Make sure you have the X win SDK installed, fink will look for it.



    You wanna blow her away? Show her this.



    God what kind of woman did you find that uses Matlab, LaTeX and BibTeX? Does she have a sister? Oh wait I'm married.




    I think you might have pointed to the key here: I ought to get fink installed and running on her powerbook first. What is the "X win SDK"? is it something from the Developers Tools or is it something that may have been installed with XDarwin and OroborousX when we installed Matlab?



    sorry, no sister! A one-of-a-kind maybe, but definitely the type who gets off on the command line and script writing: one of the first things she said was "can we get rid of the dock, icons, and finder windows and just have terminal windows?"



    But seriously, I'm afraid I am just a gui boy at heart...
  • Reply 7 of 12
    rampancyrampancy Posts: 363member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Retrograde

    I think you might have pointed to the key here: I ought to get fink installed and running on her powerbook first. What is the "X win SDK"? is it something from the Developers Tools or is it something that may have been installed with XDarwin and OroborousX when we installed Matlab?



    I believe he's talking about the Apple X11 SDK, available here:



    http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/



    I'm pretty sure you can only use it with Apple's own X11 implementation, and not with any other.



    BTW, Apple's X11 combined with Fink and Fink Commander kicks serious butt...
  • Reply 8 of 12
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    I don't know if you want to mix the Apple X11 with the others. I got the Apple X11 and the Apple X11 SDK (separate download).



    Fink is easy, download, run command there's no step three.





    What else would a geek need? Hummmm? Perl?
  • Reply 9 of 12
    123123 Posts: 278member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Scott



    You wanna blow her away? Show her this.





    So what's the deal? Do you call this a graphical equation editor? Try lyx.
  • Reply 10 of 12
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by 123

    So what's the deal? Do you call this a graphical equation editor? Try lyx.



    Well if you're a little baby you could use lyx. Only a real science geek would trust their equations to the original. Besides if all you want to do is stick an equation into keynote (or other) why not use the simple tool?
  • Reply 11 of 12
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    Hey I found this helpful when using LaTeX and generating pdfs with it.



    If you use the "stock" dvipdf command you will get bit mapped fonts. Yuck. What you need to do is use the -Pcmz or -Ppdf option in dvips.



    Now, dvipdf is just a script that runs dvips and ps2pdf. All you need to do is edit it to add "-Ppdf" or "-Pcmz" to the command. I also added "-t letter" to mine.





    Mine looks like this now.



    Code:




    exec dvips -t letter -Pcmz -q -f "$infile" | gs $OPTIONS -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -s









    the cmz option seems to do more kernaling than the pdf option. But not by much.



    HTH
  • Reply 12 of 12
    aquafireaquafire Posts: 2,758member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Retrograde

    Welcome to the party! well I have to admit it took some time to get her to consider a Mac as guis have been a no-no for her with her command line background! But I'm sure she will eventually come to love and appreciate the mac interface with a little time... but, yes, she too is stuck with the official PC stance of the university who are even nervous of having the powerbook hooked up to the network for fear of what might happen!



    Yep, They're meant to be the Intellectual powerhouses of the universe, but they get nervous when a MAC comes through the hallowed doors of Ivy league..mediocrity rules..as usual...



    You'd think that intellectual havens such as these would be shouting from the rooftops as to the second rateness of most things Pcee.....



    But that's the Msoft policy..keep users in the dark & feed them rubbish..they'll get used to it & never suspect that there is an alternative world filled with the light of ergonomic design, reliability, user friendliness and lightning speed......



    Finally, I keep wondering where we would be if Macs were used in universities & for all research during these last twenty years ?
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