LaTeX doom

Having passed through the part of my PhD where I put everything into a powerpoint and yammer about it to intensely interested audiences, I find myself instead in the part where I have to put things into papers. This means wrestling with LaTeX and spending the bulk of my time fiddling figures into the right format, dimensions, resolution, font and, possibly, the right data. I officially hate type-setting because it's entirely distracting busywork but it's busywork you've just got to do.

Still, some people have hit their heads on this wall before, so I'm extending my sincere thanks to the following things, made by real people, that have made my life a little less stressful recently. Maybe they will help you too...

Mercurial: http://mercurial.selenic.com/

For making it possible to make mistakes and magically recover without a thousand files marked '-old', '-old-old', '-broken' and '-fixed'. If you don't use version control, you're already lost.

SIUnitx: http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/siunitx/siunitx.pdf

Because no one gets the spacing with units right, and typing $^\circ$ is just too much.

Detexify: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Because I can't remember the magic words.

JabRef: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/index.php

Because who needs EndNote anyway.

The LaTeX Visual FAQ: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/visualFAQ/visualFAQ.pdf

Because clicky and my headache is solved.