My Vice-Principal is in the middle of her doctoral dissertation, and is wondering if there is a program that will format her thesis to fit APA standards. She doesn’t want to send it off to one of those $18 a page places for retyping and formatting. She asked me if I knew of any programs that do things like that. I told her I would ask around. Anybody?
silenus, is your VP aware of Endnote? That’s what I’m using for my dissertation. Basically, you type in your references in the program - or you can import them from a database like ERIC or even a library citation, and then you click an icon and it automatically inserts the cite. It also produces a reference page. Really neat program, though I feel I’m only scratching the surface of what it can do… I think it actually has templates for academic writing as well, but I don’t know how to use those. (When I was a journal editor I think a lot of manuscripts were formatted this way.)
Thanks. I’ll send her that site. At this point she is getting kinda tense about doing all those pages and cites by hand. Especially since a large portion of her cites are sites. She is really iffy on APA style cites for net sources. This might help.
I use PERRLA, it’s about $25 and works directly through MS Word. It automaticall formats the paper and title page, plus gives you a toolbar for references and cites. Makes it a lot easier.
The typesetting system LaTeX was designed primarily to produce technical and scientific documents such as journal articles and theses. An APA module for it is available; I’ve used it myself for journals that require APA style.
I would highly recommend that your friend try out LaTeX, as long as she doesn’t mind spending an afternoon learning to use it. It’s a markup-based typesetting system, not a WYSIWYG word processor, so the interface may be quite different from what she’s used to. However, it’s worthwhile to learn because of the ease with which you can produce bibliographies, citations, cross-references, and high-level formatting.
LaTeX is free software; it can be downloaded and redistributed at no charge. Versions are available for every major operating system. I believe that MiKTeX is the most popular version for Microsoft Windows.
I was going to post this earlier, but didn’t think I could do it without slamming MSOffice and Windows in general. Since I do all my typesetting from the command line in LaTeX, I can’t vouch for any of the frontends (such as MikTex). However, for WYSIWYG LaTeX, you might suggest LyX (Windows version can be found here). To get an APA formatted bibliography, use the apacite style file.
Another tool that I think might be useful is JabRef, which is a Java bibliography tool that can import/export to various formats. Of the various freeware bibliography software I’ve looked at that supports bibtex, it was the most robust and flexible.
MiKTeX is just a LaTeX distribution; I don’t think it includes any “front end” except to install packages. Editing and compilation of documents is still done via the command-line, or via your favourite LaTeX-aware editor.
Minor nitpick, but LyX is neither WYSIWYG nor LaTeX. It’s a WYSIWYM (what-you-see-is-what-you-mean) document processing system which has the capability of exporting to LaTeX format, but the format it uses natively is its own.
Ah, so it is. I had thought it was akin to whatever-it-is that my wife uses on her Mac.
Well, would you look at that. I just browsed the web site and couldn’t find this info – do you know what LyX stands for (if anything)?
Yes, but LyX relies primarily on LaTeX to produce its formatted output, and thus is accurately called a front-end to it. And while it is not purely WYSIWYG, it is much more so than editing LaTeX source in a text editor, which is obviously the point that Digital Stimulus was making.