Dear all,

I used MS-word to write my Masters dissertation project and I had a lot of problems with adjusting the figures. Do you all have better options? I've heard of Latex and Lyx (basically a user-friendly version of the former from what I've heard). Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance! :)

hi GeneNat
I use Word for journal manuscript and LaTeX for thesis! LaTeX is easier because you decide where you want things to be, not the programme!

The easiest (and most painless) way is to use a phd template. I say "pain" because if you are new to LaTeX--and you have a problem, there might be some difficulty in getting help for it (if none of your colleagues use it) and if you're new to the online LaTeX community, it takes a while to learn their lingo.

You need to read up the basics, that's what I did. The first 2 weeks were very difficult for me (maybe I'm stupid etc.) to learn LaTeX but now it is much better and very very convenient. Please try it!

You can change the citation format. You have to see your .cls and .sty file. I think I'm not explaining it clearly, I've only used it for about 3 years. Still new. But it loads very fast, and you get to be in charge!

good luck
love satchi

@GeneNat: Trying to have control where exactly an image is going to show up will just lead to lot's of frustration; delegate this to the software. Having said that, I can understand that you're unhappy with Word; plus learning LaTex is also painful, especially since it's markup is so awfully designed!

I think Lyxx is not a bad option, but I prefer the **reStructuredText** (rST) markup: A very natural system to write complex content, very little learning curve, and you get (with the right tools) the same quality PDF like with LaTex.

My favorite rST editor is https://notex.ch, since it has a straight forward UI and allows you to quickly export PDFs (or HTML; or even LaTex). Keeping the content in a *presentation agnostic* markup like rST has also huge advantages: You can later easily convert your thesis to PDFs, HTML, LaTex, EPUB (e-book) and many more target formats; see also Pandoc (a document converter) which you can use for that purpose.