After finishing my outline I now work on the details of my Alert manuscript. Still not sure, if it is going to be one or two papers (or a series) since there is a lot of ground to cover. On the other hand I do not want to duplicate any information, so for the moment I work on a single manuscript. With the structure and most figures done – the content tested at conferences, writing is pretty smooth with an established framework.
I typeset the manuscript with LaTeX, using a simple text editor, which is now my favourite way of writing long texts. I draw figures in Plot a drawing program for the Mac – both are open source tools and excellent for scientific writing. For image editing (e.g. map preparation and sampling location marking) I use The Gimp (again, a port for the Mac).
