Yuri Robbers. In this issue; Next issue: Class and Style; Editorial: LaTeX-niques

Some recent events and items in the TeX community: TeX program updates; Bigelow introduces Grotesque; Day of LaTeX; Keming (?)

A PDF file containing the entire 2008-1 issue.

Lapo Mori. This article provides the tools to write a thesis with LaTeX. It analyzes the typical problems that arise while writing a thesis and suggests solutions, mainly referring to existing packages. Many suggestions can also be applied to other kinds of document such as a book and a journal article.

Jim Hefferon. One advantage of TeX and friends is that they fit naturally into a work flow where there are many tools, each good at its own job. This paper gives an example involving a system for doing class evaluations online.

Ista Zahn. Until recently I used MS Word and clones such as OpenOffice to write academic manuscripts, as do most in my field. The standard software toolkit for many psychology professors and graduate students also includes SPSS for performing statistical analyses, and perhaps EndNote or similar reference manager software for generating bibliographies. These tools work, but my experience suggests that LaTeX based solutions have signicant advantages. This article describes how to use Sweave to write LaTeX documents in APA style, complete with results, tables, and figures generated by R.

Yogeshwarsing Calleecharan. Normal LaTeX and TeX usage does not require touching existing .bst files nor creating new ones. However, BibTeX offers several interesting commands which can be used to do many things apart bibliography generation. In this article, it is demonstrated how customized layouts for a database can be created without much trouble.

Dave Walden. In this column in each issue I muse on my wanderings around the TeX world. In this issue I touch again on a topic from my column in TPJ 2005-4 -- another ornament to use for "thought breaks."

The Editors. A Q&A column that answers the questions: How do I create math mode columns in tabular environments? and How do I find the files required to compile my document?

The Editors. Emulate the drawings done with the Spirograph children's toy using the LaTeX package PSTricks.