This blog is currently only updated infrequently, since I spend as much time as possible in finishing my PhD. During writing, you face typically two major problems in Latex: pictures and tables.

I draw my pictures in Visio, since it was the only useful tool with some good UML 2 drawing (not modelling !) support. I export the pictures as PNG, and use ebb.exe from the MikTex distribution to create a bounding box file. The resulting picture can be used by both the DVI previewer and the PDF generator.

For tables I found a nice presentation which helps you in having nicely-looking tables also in Latex.

And for the motivation, I am a frequent visitor of PhdComics …

My iBook has a Mac OS X installation that is configured to run in german language. Many Mac applications rely on the spell checker coming with the operating system, which always results in the same dialog (under “Edit” -> “Spelling”).

Most of the time I need to prepare english documents or Keynote presentations. You can switch the current dictionary for each application, by opening the spell correction dialog window, choosing a different language and simply closing the window.

If you want to avoid switching forward and backward in different applications, you can use the “multilingual” entry in the list of dictionaries. In this case, even the typing spell checker uses all dictionaries at all the time.