TL;DR

Word + Zotero (or Mendeley/EndNote) breaks at scale because field codes silently miscount when you reorder sections

The fix: drop the reference manager and use biblatex + biber + a plain .bib file in version control

For figures: PGFPlots for data plots (matches body font), TikZ for diagrams , matplotlib for huge datasets (export to PDF)

On macOS, an AI-assisted LaTeX editor like TeX64 cuts log-debugging time from hours to minutes

Set this up months before your deadline, not during

The setup that almost made me miss my deadline

I was three weeks from my thesis deadline when I realized something painful: my reference list was lying to me.

I had been using Zotero with the Word plugin for two years. Click "Insert Citation," watch the number appear, move on. Then late one night, I checked a citation in chapter 4 and the number pointed to a paper I had never read.…