I spent all summer writing my dissertation (a boring summer, but productive). Over the course of the year or so I spent writing the thing, I developed a pretty extensive workflow for dealing with it. I always enjoy reading about people’s own personal setups (my favorite sites for this are The Setup and Lifehacker’s How I Work series), so I figured I’d write my own.

Motivating factors

The primary motivator for writing the thing is that I hate Microsoft Word. I can’t stand that it uses a whole bunch of memory, drags my computer to the ground, and occasionally crashes at random. Add to that the fact that the formatting is a huge pain to get right and that my dissertation has a lot of mathematical symbols in it, I knew from the start that writing in Word was a no-go. I also realize that these problems aren’t really unique to Word, but to word processors in general, so something like Pages or LibreOffice was also out.

Since I made a living for a while as a computer programmer, I really like doing things in text editors, and I wanted my dissertation to be in plain text. As it happens, there is a file format initially designed for mathematical writing that uses plain text as a format: LaTeX to the rescue! (More on this in a bit.) Plain text means that I can also store everything in git, which is really convenient for keeping track of things as it changes over time. (The dissertation is in a repository on Github, but for now it’s a private repository. Once it’s finished for good, I’ll probably open it up.)

Hardware

The first question usually on these setup-type posts is along the lines of “What hardware do you use?” After a stint of using Linux on my laptop, I’m back to all Apple products. I type on a mechanical keyboard, and use a Casio keyboard to input things into Finale.

Software

This is where things get more interesting. The basic process is this: the text is written in LaTeX with a text editor, which is processed automatically by LaTeX and when I save, the generated PDF gets updated, which I then look at with Skim.

Emacs

The central portion of all this is the text editor. I’ve written before how I am a hardcore Vim user, but the built-in LaTeX support in Emacs made me switch. I know, I know. GNU Emacs is now my main text editor, though I use vim keybindings via the excellent Evil package. It turns out that what I like most about vim is modal editing, and the Evil vim emulation is really good. Once I trained myself to use M-x (which I’ve rebound to C-x C-m to keep my pinky from going all over the place) instead of Vim’s command line, the transition really wasn’t so bad. (You can see my dotfiles to see my whole Emacs setup.)

The reason I switched to Emacs is that the AUCTeX and RefTeX packages are extremely useful. The dissertation is a complex document with lots of examples and references, and it’s really useful to be able to pull up an outline and jump to a particular section, or to pop up a list of examples when I want to reference one in the text. I tried for a while to use the Vim AucTeX emulation, but it didn’t really work the way I wanted it to.

There are also a bunch of other features of Emacs that make it nice for writing long-form things. I use flyspell-mode for catching dumb typos, Outline minor mode for hiding and showing sections I don’t want to look at, and abbrev-mode as a poor man’s autocorrect. (In general, I don’t like autocorrect, but when I’m typing quickly I almost never type the words “transformation,” “substitution,” or “separate” properly on the first try.)

LaTeX

LaTeX is really annoying, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it to most normal people unless they have something of a masochistic streak in them. That said, it can produce (with lots and lots of coaxing) really nice PDF output. As it happens, fiddling with LaTeX settings turned out to be a really nice procrastination tool, since it’s like work, but isn’t work.

I won’t go into all of the nitty-gritty details (though I’m happy to if you email me), invaluable packages for LaTeX included these (all are in the standard TeX Live distribution):

  • fontspec/mathspec – non-hideous fonts
  • sepfootnotes – to keep footnotes in separate files from the chapter texts
  • biblatex-chicago – Chicago-style references via BibTeX. I cannot emphasize enough how much time this saved me.
  • hyperref – automagic referencing of examples, page numbers, and so on
  • xstring – really useful for creating macros. The most useful one I wrote is one that automatically substitutes # and s characters for flats and sharps, so that I could write \h{Fs7b9} and a nicely-formatted chord symbol for “F#m7b9” would come out.

There are lots of others for really minor things; once I put the dissertation on Github you can troll through my style file if you like.

LaTeX compilation was done via the latexmk tool (also included in TeXLive). I have a very simple Makefile, so that I can type make watch and this process sits there waiting for a file to change, and when it does, the whole thing is run through XeLaTeX as many times as needed. I use the PDF app Skim because it automatically refreshes when the PDF file changes, without needing to switch mouse focus to the app.

Other miscellaneous software

For musical examples, I use Finale 2011. I don’t particularly like Finale, and it often does things which are completely incomprehensible to me (that’s a rant for another post). I use the 4-year-old version because I don’t pay the Finale upgrade tax every year, though once the dissertation is over I’ll probably bite the bullet and do it again. I use Finale mostly because I know it backwards and forwards. From what I can tell, all notation software is terrible, so I see no reason to spend a bunch of time learning a new one.

The other examples (and any annotations to musical examples) are done in Adobe Illustrator. I have tried using other programs so that I don’t have to pay for Illustrator once my magical IU subscription runs out, but Illustrator really is the best I’ve found. This is also a situation like Finale: I spent a lot of time learning Illustrator, and I don’t want to invest a lot more time learning something else that’s either less good or only marginally better.

All of the finished examples are saved as PDF files in a Git submodule inside the main dissertation repository. This lets me keep the giant binary files (which git doesn’t handle well) in source control, but doesn’t bog down the main repo. It also lets me pin a particular version of the examples to a particular version of the text, which is pretty handy.

When I’m doing transcriptions, I like to use Audacity. I don’t use anything close to all of its features; it’s mostly useful because I can set it to start playing at a particular point over and over again. I prefer to transcribe at full speed (though Audacity can slow things down when I need to), so normally what I do is set the cursor at the beginning of a bar, then bang on the space bar to hear that measure 5–6 times before writing it down. Needless to say, this is really annoying for anyone that has to share an office with me (Hi Carolyn!), so this is normally done with my computer and keyboard plugged into a mixer and running into my headphones.

Dream setup

This setup works pretty well for me, but it does have a lot of moving parts. In a perfect world, some software would make it better.

  • I wish Git dealt with large binary files better. I know there are workarounds (like git annex), but they always seem clunky to me. I’ve heard that Perforce is really good at dealing with them, but that’s not distributed and there are (as far as I know) no free/cheap hosting options.

  • I really want a good tabbed PDF reader. I usually wind up with a bunch of PDFs open (the dissertation, a handful of articles, LaTeX documentation…), and it’s annoying to have them all in separate windows. I use MightyPDF if I’m just reading, since it does have tabs, but it has almost no other features. If Skim had tabbed viewing, that would be a dream.

  • I have long wanted a music notation software that has no concept of playback. I don’t need the playback, and if the software didn’t either it would let you do a bunch of things Finale and Sibelius don’t. I often want to put barlines in non-regular locations (if examples start and stop in the middle of bars), and to do that I have to go in and fiddle with the time signatures, then hide the fake time signature. I really want to be able to say “put a barline here” and have the software figure it out; if it didn’t have to play anything back it would be a lot easier.

  • Notation software that also has vector drawing tools would be amazing. Then I could just use that, without having to export Finale to EPS, then import EPS to Illustrator. There’s essentially no market for this, but if it were decent, every music theorist on the planet would buy it.

  • I also wouldn’t mind a pair of giant retina monitors and a computer with obscene amounts of memory, but my little iMac usually does ok.

This setup probably won’t work for anybody else, but it works ok for me. The hard part, of course, is actually putting the words into the system.