So I'm writing my dissertation....

The BBQ Pit
1

…which is why I haven’t been seen around these parts in a couple of months…

…and words cannot begin to express how much I hate this process.

Or rather, they can, but only if one is willing to put more time into trying to find words than I am. I spend all day trying to find the right words to explain the linked diagram theorem to someone who doesn’t know what a diagram is; I’m not willing to spend all night trying to explain
\begin{equation}
g8rguy+writing+dissertation=(deep and abiding loathing)[sup]infinity+1[/sup],
\end{equation}
even to a crowd as bright as y’all Dopers.

I think the entire problem is that stupid Word is completely and utterly incapable of dealing with complicated equations, so like a good little nerd, I’m using LaTex [sup]1[/sup]. Of course, the template is known to be full of bugs, and the little old ladies who devote their lives to making sure that each and every dissertation meets the University of Florida’s exacting standards of ugliness take special pleasure in refusing to accept dissertations because “equation 8.27 on page 125 is 1 mm too far above the following line of text.” I’ve no doubt we shall come to them presently, but as I don’t as of yet have a product to give them, they’ve yet to have the opportunity to send it back covered with red ink. But blithely ignoring the fact that I’ll be spending 8 months of my life correcting little formatting issues because the bloody LaTex template sucks ass, I’m using it anyway.

Which is a pity, really, because LaTex is a tool of the devil. How the hell am I supposed to debug “n_1(\mathbf{x}_1,\mathbf{x}1’) = \sum{pq} \left\langle\Phi_0\left|a_p^{\dagger}a_q\right|\Phi_0 right\rangle \varphi_p^{\star}(\mathbf{x}_1)\varphi_q(\mathbf{x}_1’)” when the error message is so freaking useless? (Hint to LaTex: it’s not that I’ve got an extra \left delimiter, it’s that I forgot the damned \ before one of the right delimiters. At least I recognize this error message by now. Which is a far cry from all the others that I get on a distressingly regular basis.)

When I tried to log in at 9:00 this morning (this would be pre-caffeine), I typed \begin{equation} for my username.

And we’ll not even begin to discuss the joys of attempting to generate plots with, say, Excel, because that’s what you were sent, which are then to be subsequently enclosed in the dissertation.

I’ve been here for 4 1/2 years now. I shall be here for another 4 1/2 writing, at this rate. Plus 8 months correcting formatting issues, of course, which is actually looking pretty trivial by comparison.

Dissertations are evil.

[sup]1[/sup] Which brings up another problem: you try searching the web for help with LaTex and contractions and see if you have the patience to sort through fetish sites!

2

…which is why I haven’t been seen around these parts in a couple of months…

…and words cannot begin to express how much I hate this process.

Or rather, they can, but only if one is willing to put more time into trying to find words than I am. I spend all day trying to find the right words to explain the linked diagram theorem to someone who doesn’t know what a diagram is; I’m not willing to spend all night trying to explain
\begin{equation}
g8rguy+writing+dissertation=(deep and abiding loathing)[sup]infinity+1[/sup],
\end{equation}
even to a crowd as bright as y’all Dopers.

I think the entire problem is that stupid Word is completely and utterly incapable of dealing with complicated equations, so like a good little nerd, I’m using LaTex [sup]1[/sup]. Of course, the template is known to be full of bugs, and the little old ladies who devote their lives to making sure that each and every dissertation meets the University of Florida’s exacting standards of ugliness take special pleasure in refusing to accept dissertations because “equation 8.27 on page 125 is 1 mm too far above the following line of text.” I’ve no doubt we shall come to them presently, but as I don’t as of yet have a product to give them, they’ve yet to have the opportunity to send it back covered with red ink. But blithely ignoring the fact that I’ll be spending 8 months of my life correcting little formatting issues because the bloody LaTex template sucks ass, I’m using it anyway.

Which is a pity, really, because LaTex is a tool of the devil. How the hell am I supposed to debug “n_1(\mathbf{x}_1,\mathbf{x}1’) = \sum{pq} \left\langle\Phi_0\left|a_p^{\dagger}a_q\right|\Phi_0 right\rangle \varphi_p^{\star}(\mathbf{x}_1)\varphi_q(\mathbf{x}_1’)” when the error message is so freaking useless? (Hint to LaTex: it’s not that I’ve got an extra \left delimiter, it’s that I forgot the damned \ before one of the right delimiters. At least I recognize this error message by now. Which is a far cry from all the others that I get on a distressingly regular basis.)

When I tried to log in at 9:00 this morning (this would be pre-caffeine), I typed \begin{equation} for my username.

And we’ll not even begin to discuss the joys of attempting to generate plots with, say, Excel, because that’s what you were sent, which are then to be subsequently enclosed in the dissertation.

I’ve been here for 4 1/2 years now. I shall be here for another 4 1/2 writing, at this rate. Plus 8 months correcting formatting issues, of course, which is actually looking pretty trivial by comparison.

Dissertations are evil.

[sup]1[/sup] Which brings up another problem: you try searching the web for help with LaTex and contractions and see if you have the patience to sort through fetish sites!

3

I’m sorry.

But at least you’re making me rethink the wisdom of actually listening to my advisor when she says “You should get a PhD when you finish your master’s”.

4

I’m writing too.

When the semester started, I set a goal of one page a day. It rapidly dropped to half a page per day.

Now, I’m lucky if I get one word out. I blame Straightdope and the war.

5

That sucks man… have you tried MathType? It’s a better version of MS Equation Editor… I use it all the time. Not sure if it is powerful enough for you or even accepted, but it may help.

6

g8rguy:

You are reminding me of the time some, shall we say creative individual sent me two extremely large files: one in Excel and one in Word. The problem was that he used Excel for the word-processing and Excel for the spreadsheet.

People who program that way, IMHO, are courting meeting some dude in a robe carrying a scythe. That is, if there’s any justice on the planet.

7

Yeah, it’s a lot of fun, eh? I actually had 40 pages in my first week, largely because I had no equations to type and had cleverly outlined in gory detail over the weekend. I thought I was doing really well, I was happy, yay me.

It took me another 2 weeks to add the next 20, which still isn’t too bad. Today… well, today, I managed a paragraph, at least.

And then some foolish undergrad came into the office to ask his TA for some help with his homework and started bitching about having a ten page paper due on Sunday. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or inflict great bodily pain.

8

Note: two threads were started, so I tried merging them. It seems to have worked.

Lynn

9

You know, y’all are really discouraging me from going on to grad school. :frowning:

10

Ooooh, that’s not right.

g8rguy, you have my deepest sympathies. That much LaTeX just can’t be healthy.

Hey, you want to talk about the horror of thesis templates? When I got my Master’s, the thesis template the university provided had a bug. Not just a “line space after a corollary is off by 3 points” type of bug, either, but a “if you try to generate a list of tables the document will fail to compile and LaTeX will demand a blood payment in recompense” kind of bug. I must have been the first person at the university to use the template and a list of tables at the same time. That was annoying as all hell…

Regarding your Excel graphics problem: if you have a PC with both Excel and a PostScript printer you can cross that bridge pretty easily. I discovered a while back that if you check the “print to file” box when using a PostScript printer driver under Windows, the .PRF file you get is actually a PostScript file with a few extra lines of junk at the top and bottom. Delete the first three and last three lines in a text editor, change the file extension, and voila! Instant PostScript graphic. It’ll be a full-page graphic, but that’s a start.

11

Oh boy, all sorts of stuff. Where to start, where to start? Probably by going to bed, but hey, it’s the SDMB and I’ve been away for too long as it is…

First off, sorry about the dual-thread thing, Lynn. I suppose y’all are tired of seeing this, but I swear I only hit submit once. Which is what everyone says and I’ve never believed until now.

Monty, I’m a little confused… Did you mean he did the spreadsheet in Word and the word-processing in Excel or something? What happened to Word? I’m a grad student, which means I’m easily confused.

Supernate, I actually try to use MathType as much as I can, because it’s easier than LaTex and all the staff knows Word but not LaTex anyway. But alas, with that ease of use comes the price of… well, let’s just say that there are some things one is not meant to do, and generating complicated equations with MathType is one of them. I frequently see this error that says that my equations are too large and MathType is running out of memory. So I’ve given up on that. Although what I should probably do is just use smaller equations, I suppose.

I am duly impressed by your template bug, Orbifold. At least ours works, more or less. The table of contents requires a little fineese, but at least it compiles, which is the key, right?

And I actually tried printing to a file and getting rid of the few garbage lines at the beginning and the end. All was happy. I could read the postscript. The viewer complained, but at least I could read it. I was very happy.

But for some strange reason, when I compiled the Tex, it would decide that it didn’t want to include the figure. Ghostview would complain, and then it would show me this blank page where my figure was supposed to be. I was very irritated. I suppose I should have tried printing the blank page to see if it was actually blank, but that seemed like a painful way to worry about editing and the like.

Eventually, I found out that if I converted the postscript to pdf, and then back to postscript, that I’d get either something that was happy and worked well and would actually do what it was supposed to, or else I’d get… well, not quite complete and utter garbage, but almost. I’m not quite sure what it is about the process of inserting this stuff into my template, but it doesn’t seem to like Windows postscript. Which is odd, really, since I can’t see that it’s really too much different from any other form of postscript. I was (and am) very puzzled.

Lastly, coosa, don’t listen to us. Grad school really isn’t such a bad deal. It’s just that it’s one of those things that isn’t any easier to escape from than your average prison, that’s all…

Dissertations are evil.

12

Hey g8rguy, I know your pain. I still vividly remember writing my thesis. It sort of sucked. Especially since the only way to get more than a page of writing done per day was to keep Netscape closed, so as not to be lured by the SDMB.

One tip: as soon as you have a handful of pages of completed text, with title page, references and all that, take them into the little old ladies to be format checked. Best advice I ever got – after the format check, I knew while I was writing what little formatting details to watch out for, so I didn’t get surprised with three days of edits while I was trying to pack up and move away. (There were of course still format changes, because the Office of Thesis Standards hates us, but they weren’t bad.)

Good luck. It’ll be over before you know it. (One way or another.)

13

Sorry to hear your trouble, g8rguy. If you get tired of LaTex and formula you should switch your subject to something that doesn’t require formulae, that’s what I did. :wink:

Actually I’m also in the process of writing my dissertation (philosophy), beside a day job, and I was doing just fine until I was sucked into the hole of timewasting that is SDMB (eh, monstro and giraffe?). It is only recently that I seem to crawl out of it again, but I still find it wiser to begin writing on paper instead of the computer lest I get tempted to log on the SDMB again. Still thinking of starting a ‘kick the SDMB habit’ thread…

14

The thing I hated about writing the dissertation is that the most time-consuming stuff, and the areas where I really learned the most about research, was the stuff my committee didn’t want me to write about.

I had to decide on a method of imputing missing values, and used a rule-of-thumb that couldn’t be worked out by syntax. So it took me FOREVER. How much space did that get in my methodology? Two sentences.

I spent months pilot testing my instrument and doing different validity tests. Then I did an entire test-run at an institution, a process which cost me over a thousand dollars in postage, photocopying, etc, and six months out of my life–before doing an actual data collection for analysis. I had to FIGHT to get them to agree that I could dedicate a short chapter to this process.

It also took me a painful number of monthys to learn that “Master Documents” in my version of Word are so buggy, annoying, and crash-prone that no sane person would use this feature.

15

g8rguy: Yep, he did the word processing in Excel. Gah! The stupidity of it! One keystroke error and then you’ve no idea where the rest of the sentence follows! Remember, that there’s a maximum number of characters you can put into one cell. And using Word for the spreadsheet!?!? Gah! The spreadsheet was huge. Huge, I say! Slower than death on crutches, plus Word’s table functions are nowhere near as nifty as Excel’s.

16

Dude, if LaTex is the worst of your troubles, count your blessings.

LaTex is joy, compared to the personalities of your committee members. (And fairly beautiful in its own way. If you were destined for typesetting instead of math.)

My dim recollection is that there are a couple of LaTex word processors out there-- they might help you debug more quickly. Plus, since it’s compiled, you can put the parens on different lines… I had equations that were loads easier to read over 10 lines than 1. Then you can just fit your university’s template around what you know compiles correctly. (We had no official template, just hand-me-downs from people who finished before us.)

I find that I’m able to use MathType for everything I do now. Whew.

17

Well that’s odd. I admit I’ve never used that trick myself to generate an embedded figure; I just use it as the fastest way I know of to convert a MS Word document into a PDF file.

Hmm…I’d bet two imaginary nickels (what can I say, grad student=poverty) that the problem has something to do whether or not the generated PostScript file has a “%%BoundingBox” statement in the preamble. But I’d also bet two more imaginary nickels that you’ve already found a solution that’s less trouble then editing PostScript files by hand.

18

Oh, I had to do that-- the S-Plus figures just wouldn’t come out with tick labels that were big enough. Now that was more fun than hacking LaTex!

19

Yay LaTeX! The trick to writing your dissertation easily is to do all of your assignments in LaTeX, beginning in the middle of third (junior) year undergrad.

Didn’t you think of that? :wink:

Actually, I’m just getting down to some LaTeX… why? Because I love you.

And I need to make some slides.

20

Y’know, you could have just submitted the title of your rant, and we all would have understood…at least those of us who have been to grad school. Dissertations are always evil, by definition. May the formatting issues be the worst of it for you. (I didn’t have formulas to deal with, but I did have 4 leg surgeries and a dead committee member, and a couple of Chechen conflicts, necessitating 3 retroactive extensions from the Dean, so I’ll try to feel your pain.)

Best of luck!