[Air-L] LaTex for writing a PhD

[Daniel Kunzelmann]

Dear all,

I was wondering if you had any suggestions for a LaTeX editor? I just 
started with my dissertation (resp. its writing) and want to try LaTex 
instead of fighting with Word formatting. Any experience would be 
helpful especially with regards to "academic work" (citation, footnotes, 
etc.), because there are a lot of editors out there...

I'd prefer an offline version that has a lively community (resp. whose 
programmers still work on its improvements).
I'm currently working with Citavi (so it should best capable of dealing 
with the literature list it produces).
Also using MaxQda (even though I don't think this will matter with 
regards to LaTex).
And, once in a while, I want to export a chapter for my supervisors (not 
only a PDF but maybe also a DOC or OpenOffice or something like this, so 
that they can easily add comments).

Thanks a lot :)
Daniel