Recently I have been trying to figure out how OpenOffice’s bibliographic reference management works, so I would no longer need to manage references manually. Especially if documents become large with a lot of references, doing it manually can become quite a burden. However, OpenOffice disappoints me again because it’s bibliographic management feature is severely lacks in usability. After I fired up Google to find solutions to a few problems I encountered with the feature, I found this and this forum topic. The conclusion seems to be that OpenOffice’s bibliography features are worthless, and that you’re better off if you use an external application for bibliography management. But I don’t think that makes things more convenient, and I have more gripes with OpenOffice besides bibliography management, so I was thinking of possible alternatives to OpenOffice. This is important to me now, because in the next quarter of my academic year I will be required to conduct research.
Then I found information about LyX, which basically is a graphical user interface which uses LaTeX under the hood. LyX seems to offer an easier way to harness it’s power than using LaTeX directly. I’ve read about LaTeX before, but I thought it was meant for the mathematicians who need to use formulas in their documents, because that is it’s greatest advantage. But apparently it should also be well suited for those who study the humanities as well, because of the appraisal of it’s bibliography management features (achieved by using BibTex) – which is exactly what I’m looking for. Documents produced with LaTeX also look a lot better to the eye than those produced with OpenOffice or Microsoft Word, because of the superior quality of typesetting provided by TeX through LaTeX. On the LyX wiki a lot of information is provided, like document classes (some sort of templates?) for those in the humanities and example theses. I’m going to give LyX a try, and I’ll report my findings here.