I plan to write this blog as I go and hopefully organize my thoughts and as a side benefit I can hopefully help someone else who happens to have the same ideas/questions/problems.
I will not dwell on the details about my choice, but here is a summary:
Summary
In the coming months I will begin my Master's Thesis using the program Pages from the iWork Suite. A year ago, I began experimenting with TexShop and latex. I have found that this is a great way to write long documents if you are comfortable writing computer code. It is also frustrating, as a linguist, when I want to simply drag and drop characters from the Mac OS X character palette to TexShop and it does not work (despite using UTF-8 as the format).
Microsoft Word is a pig. Its great and terrible simultaneously. It can do everything, but that also gets in the way. It can be quite difficult to solve problems. It can be slow.
iWork Pages, on the other hand, is lighter and faster. I have heard that it is slow when writing large documents (+3000 pages), but I have also read of people writing books (happily) with Pages. My experience with Pages is good (except for Table of Contents formatting--academic style). I particularly like have an absolute point of origin on the top-left corner of the page (0,0) for the ruler, unlike Microsoft Office's relative ruler. Its better for page layout. The quickly accessible style selector is great and the ability to have the program window slim and sleek is great.
Startup Setup
There are three things I am starting out with. iWork is not free, but the BibDesk and CiteInPages are free.
iWork Pages 09' <www.apple.com>
BibDesk <http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/>
CiteInPages <http://jhh.med.virginia.edu/main/CiteInPages>
Step 1: Start BibDesk and save a new bibliography database. Mine is called 'bibliography_master.bib'. Keep everything in there. Make sure so keep this file safe and remember where you save it.
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