User:Rory/thesis

When I was a student I used LaTeX a lot. Since I entered the "real world", though, I have hardly had a chance to use TeX or LaTeX, and my knowledge and skills have atrophied, and, in the case of LaTeX, have become badly out of date. TeX and friends continue to fascinate me, though, and I've decided to try to get back into the habit of using it. This time around I've decided to try ConTeXt, rather than LaTeX, as I find it very interesting.

ConTeXt is a big system, though, and although there is a lot of documentation for it, it is spread across many files of varying age. Also, I find some of these documents quite confusing. So, I've decided I cannot expect to just straight into things and typeset "current" documents using ConTeXt, as the process is likely to be too frustrating. Therefore I have decided to begin by taking one of my old LaTeX documents and resetting it using ConTeXt. The document I have chosen is my doctoral thesis.

I plan to use this page to keep track of problems I have as I go, and the solutions I come up with. As such, it is intended primarily to be a set of private notes, and so may not be useful to others. I may use links to this page in messages to the mailing list when I have problems that I just cannot solve myself.

The Document

My field of study was Mathematics. More specifically, my dissertation was in a subfield of Logic called Recursion Theory (which is also called Computability Theory). The field doesn't have very much crazy notation, but there are a few things which may not be possible in vanilla ConTeXt; these will give me a chance to learn some tricks.

There are several reasons why I think that typesetting this thesis will be instructive for me.

• The document is around 80 pages, and so there may be pagination problems to solve.
• There is a significant amount of mathematics, so I will need to learn about ConTeXt's support for displayed equations.
• I have frontmatter (title page, acknowledgements, etc) and a table of contents.
• I have a small bibliography (about 15 references) so I can learn about ConTeXt's support for this.
• There are internal cross references.
• The overall style of the document is fixed by my school's thesis requirements, so I can learn how to set margins and so forth.

I still have LaTeX sources for the document, so I won't need to type everything in again from my hard copy.

My Goals

My primary goal is to learn some ConTeXt, and to learn how to use ConTeXt the "right way". This is an open ended task, though, so I need a more concrete target to guide me. So, I hope to meet the following requirement.

• Use ConTeXt to typeset my thesis to the requirements of the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School as they were when I was a student there. (I graduated in 1999.)

After this is done I hope to use the newly created document as a jumping-off point to try out such things as

• different fonts (both heading, text, and mathematics) - this will require some understanding of ConTeXt's bewildering typescript system;
• different page sizes and proportions;
• twosided formatting;
• multicolumn display (though I'm not sure how well this will work with so much displayed mathematics);
• indexes;
• interactive documents; and
• others, as they come to mind.

This is likely to take me quite a long time. I don't have much time to spare for fun projects like this, so I expect to progress in fits and starts.