Lyx is an open source, structured document creation system. Conceptually, it falls somewhere between a markup editor and a word processor. The creators of Lyx have coined the term WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) to summarise the approach that Lyx takes to document creation. The current stable version of Lyx is the recently released 1.4.4. However, on the 21st of Feb 2007, the team released the first beta of 1.5.0. The development team officially support builds for Linux, MacOSX and Windows. Other users can, of course, build from source.
External tools and extensions
In this article, I’ll give an overview of Lyx and try to cover some of the new features that have been introduced in 1.5.0. Lyx is a very powerful program and contains too many features to list here. In truth, in an article of this length, I wouldn’t even be able to cover most of the new features of 1.5.0, so, I’ll give you an overview of some of the features that I make use of in my day to day use.
An overview of Lyx
The driving concepts behind Lyx’s approach are the separation of content from formatting and structured document creation. Lyx probably isn’t the tool for every type of writing. Where is shines is in the creation of documents such as reports, articles and books.
The separation of content and formatting.
Hand editing mark-up such as HTML in a text editor would be an extreme example of separation of content and formatting. When editing markup in this way, the user uses tags to specify the formatting, knowing that the finished document will look very different from the source code.
Most wordprocessors represent the other extreme as they attempt to give the user a WYSIWYG representation of the document while the user is editing it.
I can highlight one weakness of this approach with an example:
What if I wanted to use an unusual font on part of the document? Within a word processor, I would have to actually edit using that font, regardless of its usability. I could solve this problem by using a more neutral font when editing and then change back to desired font for print out. Unfortunately, as you change the font, all of the document layout alters around it. Another problem with this approach is that, in my experience, a procedure of this sort is apt to encourage errors to creep into the creative process.
The preceding example might seem somewhat contrived but a more common problem would be that a lot of people, such as myself, like to use a sans-serif font as a screen font while preferring the look of a serif font on the printed page.
Ideally, the user shouldn’t be overly concerned with layout and formatting while he or she is creating the content.
Another weakness of WYSIWYG becomes apparent on projects in which the finished document will need to be transformed from one format to another. In most word processors, the user is free to add formatting that has no real meaning in relation to the content. Such inconsistencies might not even be apparent when editing the document. However, features such as extra spaces and carriage returns are interpreted literally by conversion programs, with potentially baffling results for the reader of the target document.
To use an analogy, often, when teaching someone how to use a word-processor, it is difficult to convince them of the importance of using tabs as opposed to spaces. To the novice they are both equivalent as they look the same on screen.
WYSIWYM
As I said earlier, Lyx strikes a slightly different balance to that of a word processor when it comes to the relationship between layout and content.
Lyx sits on top of a well-established publishing markup language called Latex. The user is protected from the actual markup language. For example, I use Lyx quite a lot and I can’t think of any Latex tags, off hand. However, the user can enter actual Latex into the document (ERT – Evil Red Text, as Lyx calls it) on the occasions when it is needed. One use for this would be that the user might want to make use of a slightly less common feature such as starting a numbered bulleted list with a value other than 1. Latex is vast and the chances are, if there is something you want to do in terms of typesetting, there is a way of doing it within Latex.
Latex is also extensible and there exist many add-ons to do unusual things such as adding Latex commands to handle unusual formatting requirements. For example, if you were writing an academic report for a journal with some weird formatting requirements, you’d probably be able to find a latex class that can support it.
Don’t worry, even though it’s mark-up underneath, Lyx does reflect things such as font size and weight, visually, onscreen in much the same way as word processor.
As the Lyx editor is not focused around document layout, the text simply re-wraps to window size. This means that you don’t have to work full screen all of the time. This comes in handy when, for example, I am taking notes from a web page.
In those cases, I start by making the Lyx window small. On my KDE setup, each window has a “stay at front” control on it and I activate that. I can then work with the webpage in the background and without fear of the Lyx window obscuring things or getting pushed to the back. To do the same in a word processor, I suppose that I would have to change the margins or alter the zoom factor of the document.
I’m not much of a mathematician myself but even I have, on occasion, made some small use of the powerful, integrated math editor.
The structured approach
As it sits on top of markup, Lyx imposes some restrictions, in terms of document layout. For example, in Lyx, the purpose of a carriage return is to end a paragraph and start a new one. Consequently, if the user hits return a second time, nothing happens. This is because, in Lyx, a carriage return is used to mark the end of a paragraph, rather than to create extra white space.
This might seem restrictive at first, but like a lot of structured approaches to creative things, it is a truism that if you can’t state why you wanted to add an element – or in other words what its meaning was – it’s usually an indication that the idea was not as well conceived as it should have been. When you need a special piece of formatting, impose that as part of the style of the document. It might have been apparent, to you, what you meant by some ad-hoc formatting, but it might not be as obvious to the person who has to use your document.
Document structure
The basic unit of composition in Lyx is the paragraph. Every element of the document should be contained within a paragraph. Each paragraph has, associated with it, a style. For example, a subsection title is paragraph with the style of “subsection”. Upon adding a new section header, the document structure is updated; so, if the user has added a table of contents at the start of the document, the new section will be added to the contents.
As you might expect, there are styles for things like quote, quotation, bullet lists and description of terms paragraphs.
The user is able to browse the document structure in the document overview. Lyx features a drop down menu-based structure browser that looks a bit like a dynamically generated version of the bookmarks menu of a web browser. 
In addition to this, Lyx offers a pop up browser dialogue. With the advent of 1.5.0, the developers have added the much requested feature of allowing the user to move sections up and down in order to move whole sections around the document. Sections can also be promoted or demoted from within this dialogue.
If the user chooses, the chapters, parts, sections, subsections and subsections can be automatically numbered.
Graphics and tables
When adding a table or graphic figure, you can insert directly into the document. However, a better use of Lyx functionality is to insert the table or figure into a floating frame. Such a floating frame can be moved about the document by the typesetting algorithm when the finished document is exported. Don’t worry, the reader won’t loose the table or frame as an anchor can be attached to it so that when the text says something like “see figure #6 for an example”, Lyx can be told to add something like, “in section 3.2 on page 32” or “on the next page” to the finished document.
Support for file formats.
One of Lyx’s strengths is its support for different file formats.
Output formats
Being based upon mark-up, Lyx is particularly adept at exporting to other mark-up based formats such as HTML. You can add nearly any format to Lyx, as a export format, as long as you have a command line tool to convert from latex.
For example, I have my Lyx setup so that I can output modern CSS HTML or 2.0 HTML, depending on what I need. To do this I had to first, within the GUI, add a “file format” that I call “HTML (modern)”. I then added a “converter” called “latex to html”. I associated with this the command line “htlatex $$i” (htlatex is a command line tool for converting between html and latex). I went through a similar procedure when adding an exporter for HTML 2.0. I use HTML 2.0 in cases in which the submission procedure for an article specifies that only a small subset of basic tags can be used.
If you can find a tool to convert a format from Latex, you should be able to add it as a converter for use with Lyx. As standard, Lyx is set up to export a handful of common formats such as HTML, PDF and RTF. This is how I like to work with the program, and personally, if the developers were to remove printing functionality from them program, I wouldn’t miss it.
When outputting to a format such as postscript or PDF, the layout is handled by the time-served TEX engine. This engine gives the finished document a polished, professional look that is uncannily like that of a text book.
In 1.5.0, making a quick check of the document rendered within the PDF viewer of your choice is now as simple as clicking on a toolbar icon.
Input formats
With input formats, things get even better. You can setup converters in order to allow you to import different document types. However, it gets better still as you can set up converters that allow you to actually incorporate various files into Lyx.
For example, I like creating my diagrams in Inkscape. Unfortunately, Lyx doesn’t come with SVG support built in. To remedy this, I added the file type and some converters. Subsequently, I can now add SVG diagrams directly into the document. To be rendered onscreen, Lyx converts to into a bitmap format. When exporting to PDF, it converts the source file into a vector format that the PDF converter understands.
If you can find a tool to convert your file into EPS (encapsulated postscript), you can work with it in Lyx.
For some functionality, Lyx requires the assistance of external tools.
One example of this would be when making use of a Bibtex format bibliography database. For example, if I wanted to cite the source of a quotation, I first click on the “insert citation” icon. Having done this, I can then search within and select an entry from the database as my source. Different academic disciplines have different conventions for citation format but I have Lyx setup so that it places a number within square brackets. At the end of the document, Lyx can place a key to all of the citations in the document. 
However, to actually insert an entry into the Bibtex database, an external tool must be used. This means that the same Bibtex database can be used between multiple documents and with any piece of software that understands the format. There are a lot of Bibtex tools available but I use a KDE app called KBib.
Obviously, Lyx isn’t an office suit. Graphics editing, for example, must be done with external tools.
Document classes
Another way that Lyx can be expanded is through the use of document classes. As supplied, Lyx comes with document classes for various types of book, report, article and some esoteric formats such as those that adhere to various scientific and academic journal specifications. In addition, it also comes with a screenplay and a stage-play class.
The Community
Lyx is widely used and has great community supporting it. Check out the mailing list archive on the website. If you have a problem that you can’t answer via the documentation, the user mailing list should be your next stop. In addition, whenever I have interacted with the developers, I have found them to be helpful and genuinely interested in user opinions.
I think that the quality of a support community is an important feature that is often overlooked when people are assessing a new piece of software.
New in 1.5.x
Lyx is so big that that it contains many features that I will probably never even visit, although their omission might have been a deal-breakers for other people. The new Unicode support would be an example of such a feature. That said, I might benefit from Unicode support in the future if it enables interoperability with new third-party tools.
As I said above, within this overview, I am only able to scratch the surface of the new features, but the ones that I am particularly looking forward to exploring include: the glossary support, the enhanced table support, the aforementioned enhancements of the section browser and the new MDI interface.
The GUI has had a revamp for 1.5.x and it now makes use of QT4. The 1.4.x series had somehow lost some of its GUI speed when compared with 1.3.x. The developers were aware of this and have solved the performance problems that had gradually crept in.
In general, while writing this article in the 1.5.x beta, it seems as though every menu and toolbar has been features an enhancement of some sort.
Criticisms of Lyx
Obviously, Lyx isn’t suitable for every type of document creation.
Strict formatting
Lyx is designed for the creation of documents such as reports, articles and books. If I were given the task of creating a document with loose formatting, such as a leaflet, I would probably use Open Office Word. Also, although I am sure that journals and such have been created with Latex in the past, given the task of creating a print magazine, I would be more inclined to use Open Office or perhaps even a fully-fledged DTP package.
In general, one is sometimes better doing things “the Lyx way” as opposed to working against Lyx in terms of formatting.
Quirky user interface
It has to be said that Lyx is a bit quirky in comparison with a standard word processor. To create anything beyond the most basic document, most users would need to look at the Lyx documentation. Lyx ships with document classes for things like letters or a CV but I would doubt that even the most experienced word processor user would be able to create documents of those types without making use of the Lyx manual.
I think that too much is made of GUI consistency these days. For an application that is designed for occasional, casual use, a user interface that complies with standard conventions is a must. However, in the case of an application that is going to be used for long periods of time, for serious work, I think that a user interface that requires some learning time is acceptable. This is why people who do actual content creation favour features such as keyboard shortcuts.
In summary, I consider it to be acceptable to invest some time in learning a tool that is going to be used for serious project work. On the other hand, a person who might write two or three letters a year, might be better off with a more standard word processor.
In Summary
Lyx is a wonderfully useful tool, in both conception and execution, and I would recommend that anyone who is interested in writing check it out.
Lyx certainly isn’t a “do everything” text editor but I think that it’s a shame that more people don’t know about it. It’s also a shame that there isn’t some serious corporate interest in developing it. I’m left wondering what tools big organisations actually use to create their documentation. Hand written mark-up? A word processor?
A tool like Lyx creates allows content creators to concentrate on what they should be concentrating on: the creation of the content. As needed, the documents can be reliably exported to whatever format is needed at the time. The beauty of Lyx, is that you can create all of your content from within one piece of software, regardless of the eventual output format.
About the author:
Mike is an average super-turbo-geek and once tried to ask a woman out using set-theory. By the time he drew a big circle around the symbol that represented him and the symbol that represented her, she had realised what he was getting at and made a run for it. Check out his website: The Unmusic Website.
Personally, I like to use a plain text editor for writing. On my Mac, it works great since spell check is available system wide (at least for Cocoa apps).
I need to find something similar for XP.
Unfortunately, LyX doesn’t handle complex documents very well. To get output it needs to use the local latex compiler, which is fine. Unfortunately Lyx often creates uncompilable latex even for the simplest thing. It’s a fantastic concept, but needs a lot more work before I’d use it for anything at all complex.
Unfortunately, LyX doesn’t handle complex documents very well. To get output it needs to use the local latex compiler, which is fine. Unfortunately Lyx often creates uncompilable latex even for the simplest thing. It’s a fantastic concept, but needs a lot more work before I’d use it for anything at all complex.
I have never had this problem with it. Not saying that you’re wrong; we’re probably just using it for different things. I have used it on Solaris and Windows for doing “fancy” math documents, and everything has been fine.
For that application, at least, it’s a good, easy tool.
I use LyX very often, and never had such problems. Never heard about them too. Perhaps I’m just lucky? Never seen something better than LyX/LaTeX for writing complex documents…
Word processors like MS Word or OO.o Write are a dangerous, time-wasting tool if improperly used. Although both of these support styles, I would bet that 99% of users ignore these features and micro-format everything on the fly. Many users don’t want to spend the time to learn or tweak style settings for the common documents they create, but they pay for it later. For example, it often takes hours or days to tweak a document when a formatting change is required, or when small format change is made and the entire document is thrown into a jumbled confusion. Lyx / LaTex is really a beautiful tool for serious companies who don’t want their writers to have to work double-duty as graphic designers.
Edited 2007-02-27 17:41
I can second that … well the bit with MS Word. I work for a software company (enterprise client server software)and our application consultants have to frequently write 800 page long design documents for our clients … in Word – absolute nightmare, especially if ore than one consultant works on the document. We usually spend at least 2-4 days fixing the problems created by Word, before we can send the document out to client and a reasonable (albeit not great) state. I haven’t tried Lyx myself … would it be able to handle that kind of documentation, 800 pages, diagrams screenshots, tables, cross-references, footnotes … the lot?
Wow, 800 pages. Yes, Lyx, or at least the LaTex system, is IDEAL for adding cross refs, footnotes, diagrams, everything that a professional document usually contains. In fact it was designed with that sort of document in mind. It’s not worth it for a two page memo, but anything over 8 pages and it’s worth the learning curve to do it in LaTex. LaTex effectively does the style proofreading so you don’t have to.
“Although both of these support styles, I would bet that 99% of users ignore these features and micro-format everything on the fly.”
I think you’re right. I just held such a ridiculous document in my hands. Glad we’re using OpenOffice at work, I extracted the text and typesetted it in less than three minutes. Now it’s looking fine.
“Micro-formatting” is a nice term to describe what many people – mostly home users – do with well engineered applications as OpenOffice. Styles are supported for years, but most users don’t notice this. Or they don’t care.
“For example, it often takes hours or days to tweak a document when a formatting change is required, or when small format change is made and the entire document is thrown into a jumbled confusion.”
When I was at the university, I had to advice some students how to typeset a diploma thesis. They didn’t know how to do it using their expsensive MICROS~1 programs. And what they gave in for correction simply looked terrible, just as a child has written it. Text was arranged using spaces, strucural elements were implemented via font size and decorations. Section 1 had subsections A, B and C, while section 2 had subsections I, II, III and IV. The text lines were set nearly on top of each other. No margins, no page numbers, no table of contents. And the source directory was a mess. Needless to say you can to a quite adequate diploma thesis with OpenOffice. But why isn’t it done the way the developers intended it to be done? Maybe it would be an option for OpenOffice to have a “typesetting mode” which prevents the user from doing the silly stuff described above.
“Lyx / LaTex is really a beautiful tool for serious companies who don’t want their writers to have to work double-duty as graphic designers. “
I totally agree and would like to {/em emphasize} two words which I think are important:
serious
Serious work requires educated judging about (1) what tool to use and (2) how to use this tool. A certain knowledge is needed to choose the right tool for each job. “Try and error” is not and educated concept for creating documents.
writer
Writers create content and structure, not text attributes. If they’re serious, they concentrate on what they want to express. They use the proper means of the respective language. They plan how to structure their document. It’s kids who like their text coloured, their lines rolling and their documents looking funny.
>>And what they gave in for correction simply looked terrible, just as a child has written it. Text was arranged using spaces, strucural elements were implemented via font size and decorations. Section 1 had subsections A, B and C, while section 2 had subsections I, II, III and IV. The text lines were set nearly on top of each other.
Yep. At my job they were doing patent declarations, and pulling off the same tricks with MS Word. “Spacebar formatting.”
I try to always use styles in Word, but unfortunately, sometimes explicit formatting works more reliably in Word due to bugs. This is mostly related to lists, both numbered and bulleted – they have a nasty habit to change formatting even when set using a properly defined style. This is only exacerbated by external tools working with Word such as Trados. I’ve had it both in 2000 and 2003 versions, though 2003 was slightly better in this respect. OpenOffice.org is more reliable here, but has other quirks and shortcomings that prevent me from being really productive in it even when I don’t need 100% MS compatibility for the job.
“OpenOffice.org is more reliable here, but has other quirks and shortcomings that prevent me from being really productive in it even when I don’t need 100% MS compatibility for the job.”
So the LaTeX itemize and enumerate environments are what you’re searching for.
By sb56637 (1.85) on 2007-02-27 17:39:33 UTC
Word processors like MS Word or OO.o Write are a dangerous, time-wasting tool if used.
There, I fixed it for you.
Yeah, they’re perfectly adequate for a memo or a letter, but for anything of serious length there is no beating LaTeX. In the last few years, I’ve done two large project reports (100+ pages) in Word (because nobody else on my team had ever heard of LaTeX). It generally took two people most of a weekend to do the final print-out. Some of that was due to last-minute tweaking, but a large percentage of it was due to iterating between Word and the printer, trying to get them to agree on what the document looks like. And don’t even get me started on how sketchy Word gets when handling large, complex documents.
PS> Apparently, not just my experience either. Though, I’ve got another anecdote to throw at Word’s feet. My dad works in international development. USAID, the part of the government that handles such work, standardized on Word in the late 1990s. Every time the company sends out a proposal or final report (which generally run 50-100 pages of core text, plus several times that in appendices), they have a team of people (a lot of interns!) work out the micro-formatting. This is a process that can take the better part of a week for a large report.
Edited 2007-02-28 00:45
Personally, I like the concept of a diversion between content and form. The writer can concentrate on what he intends to say rather than which font size, attributes etc. he wants to use. LyX supports this concept and helps the author in preventing him doing silly things like typing a single space on a line or formatting tables (or twocolumn text) with spaces – don’t tell me anything, I’ve seen it all!
I do most work in “real” LaTeX (pdflatex): Scientific papers, forms, reports, flyers, memos, notes, letters. Especially for scientifical publications it’s very nice because you can easily use formulas and graphs. You even can compost symbols that are not available by default, such as arrows with text on top of stacked letters.
While LyX sometimes has problems with complex documents (including references, footnotes, citations, images etc.) – as it has been pointed out -, it’s fine for the most simple documents.
People who have something to say that they consider to be of some value, they mind the proper form of the document. Form should always be adequate to content. Or what would you think about an application for a job written on toilet paper? Using LyX, documents don’t look half-hearted (or, as we say in german, “hingekackt und hingeschissen” – translate for yourself). LyX is able to use wellformed fonts.
Furthermore, LyX and LaTeX take care of what most people just don’t know about: Typesetting. LyX is not a word processor, it’s a typesetting system, so is LaTeX. LyX does not require the author to know about jyphenation, grey values, paragraph setting and all these “complicated” things.
I’ve seen a lot of MICROS~1 “Office” spoiled users having problems to seperate content from form in their mind or developing a document structure (sections, subsections, paragraphs, enumerations etc.). But in fact, it’s what most people seem to want to have: A program that just lets them type their text and then formats it automagically, correct and pretty.
BTW, tkbrief (“Brief” is a letter in german) is a nice tool, too. Personally, I use a preconfigured dinbrief documentclass for my private letters. This “made me a lawyer” at a local court, just by the form. I had to write some text to the judge for a friend of mine, and the answer was “Sehr geehrter Herr Rechtsanwalt… als Verteidiger in dem Verfahren…” (Rechtsanwalt = attorney at law / lawyer, Verteidiger = defender) – they really thought I was a lawyer, but I never claimed to be one. Just because my letter seemed to look this way…
With a few hacks, LaTeX and LyX can be made supporting the standard german orthography and hyphenation. This is something that is hard to realize in OpenOffice and, as far as I know, impossible in MICROS~1’s product for some years – they only support a non-official / non-ministerial subset of some newspeak derivate.
“While LyX sometimes has problems with complex documents (including references, footnotes, citations, images etc.) – as it has been pointed out -, it’s fine for the most simple documents. ”
The secret is to have a padded desk as to not knock yourself out trying to figure it out. I spent probably around 2 hours trying to get citations and references working properly. Once it worked, it worked great.
I use Lyx for almost everything, however, I have found a few places where it could be fixed up.
1. I gives crazy error messages, which, if you use latex might make sense, but for someone who has only used Lyx(yeah I know) most of the errors are crazy cryptic.
2. The UI needsd some consistancy, though I am a stickler for that. I have 3 different versions(on different platforms) and they all have different UI’s, no big changes, but it can be a little disorienting. This problem appears to be clearing up however.
3. Trying to wrap your head around some of the elements require that padded desk to hit your head on. Tables sometimes cause errors, and Lyx is more than happy to allow you to pick mutually exclusive options and just fail silently(or loudly depending on what you did). Now, most of this is just learning curve but it still can get crazy.
With these three things in mind I highly recommend Lyx and have converted several people to it. Even with those times I sometimes feel like firing up OpenOffice.org Writer because Lyx isn’t doing what i want, when it finally works, it works great. And there is something about submitting a report and having it just look great that I really enjoy.
I tried Lyx several times. It always failed, due to the bad user interface. It was not only how it was set up, it was also due to the used toolkit itself.
For example, the menu font was too big, so not all entries did fit into the window. Now if you wanted to reach the last visible entry (which was cut), the application crashed.
Oh, this was really a showstopper!
I’m very glad to read they switched to QT4, which is a very decent toolkit! I guess it’s time to give it yet another try
My experience is its surprisingly easy to teach, once people get the knack of using the pulldown menu for styles.
Its often the little things that make a difference to users. For example, I have set people up with a 19 inch screen, opening one page full screen length for writing, and then putting on the right the table of contents.
This is a pretty simple outliner, but to someone whose earlier experience is navigating through a huge document with just up and down arrows in a WP, it seems like magic. You just hop around effortlessly from section to section, you collapse and open up your section headings, you write and always have the structure of the document over on the right of the screen, you promote and demote by pulling down and clicking headings. You are really free to focus on content and structure.
In addition, Lyx is the only thing that I’ve ever seen produce a reaction of speechless pleasure and amazement when the user first saw the pdf output. How could it be that something so booklike came out with absolutely no attention to formatting?
And best of all, you never again have your support person telling you to use tabs instead of spaces when you really can’t see what difference it should make….
Anyone supporting authors should make a serious effort to get them using Lyx. If they get over the first steep part of the curve, they will never go back to WP.
I tried this thing a few times, and I alway came back to the command line. I still use Word and OO writer for quick things, but if I care about formatting, I use the above mentioned tools or – suprise, suprise, Google docs.
Yes, the latter has its use – especially for quickly typing up something that you intend on distributing via .pdf. Don’t use tables, though, it is painfully slow
Sadly, I had to rely on Office for my PhD thesis…
I write articles about genomics, which require extra long tables. In the past, I struggled with LaTeX to format those use tables over several pages but I just don’t have the time anymore. A simple copy paste from Excel into Word does the job. I just wish that OpenOffice would have a nice bibliography system like the LaTeX/BibTez combo.
Until then, I must endure Office/Endnote.
I’m a mathematician, and I use Lyx nearly every day to write tests, homework solutions, and even papers for journals. It’s great to use instead of LaTeX, and the developers have put serious work into it. I’ve even reported bugs that they’ve fixed, and the mailing list is responsive.
That said, consider this example from the article: What if I wanted to use an unusual font on part of the document? Within a word processor, I would have to actually edit using that font, regardless of its usability. I could solve this problem by using a more neutral font when editing and then change back to desired font for print out. Unfortunately, as you change the font, all of the document layout alters around it. Another problem with this approach is that, in my experience, a procedure of this sort is apt to encourage errors to creep into the creative process.
As a die-hard user of Lyx, I must say that this example actually reflects worse on Lyx than on Word. I don’t believe the author has ever tried changing the typeface in LyX… say, changing the serif typeface from the defaults to URW Garamond to Bitstream Charter. I have done so, and I wish him good luck! At a minimum, one has to know a little LaTeX. More than likely (especially if one isn’t using MikTeX, which miraculously finds & installs packages that aren’t pre-installed, something other TeX distributions haven’t figured out yet), you’ll have to install additional fonts by hand. This is no mean feat, considering that the installation instructions on CTAN aren’t entirely correct (updmap, oops, we mean updmap-sys on some systems, and even then following the directions doesn’t work on a few systems).
More so, and even worse for the author’s example, once you’ve installed these fonts, you still have only one serif typeface available for the entire document. Period. If you want to change the serif font throughout the document from time to time, you’ll have to know even more LaTeX, because Lyx doesn’t let you switch typefaces (from Computer Modern to Times New Roman, say) in the middle of a document.
Sure, you can get the help necessary to figure out how to do it. But it isn’t for newbies and the faint of heart. You’ll spend so long doing it the first time that you’ll regret having wished that you could use a different serif font. After that, it works, and you love it and you think you’re hot stuff. But you’ll pull out a lot of hair until then.
I do not mean this as a slight against Lyx; Lyx is a great program that makes my life immensely easier. The example given is simply not the best.
Another surprisingly effective tool for professional, consistent formatting is any one of the good wikis available on the internet. All of them have a lightweight markup language where you define “what” you are typing, and then there’s an interpreter that turns it into consistent, well-formatted text. I actually prefer these wikis to a wordprocessor when I have a small document to write containing a few tables or headings or ordered lists. My favorite is http://tiddlywiki.com . It’s a single interactive html file with a CSS stylesheet that defines all the parts of the document and an easy markup language. These combine to produce beautiful, consistent formatting.
…only worse. From the user interface to the file format, one would be hard pressed to crate a worse editor. It is beyond my ken as to how anyone could possibly recommend the use of such a monstrous blight.
Although [La]TeX proper does take a few minutes to learn, the extra time spent pays for itself very quickly. If one really needs menus and a full development environment, TeXShop, Kile, and TeXnicCenter are much superior options.
I hear what you’re saying and to some degree I think you’re right in principle. Lyx can become complex. However, I ultimately think it’s an excellent bridging tool to take those who are only familiy with Word Processors towards a more Latex orientated approach. So, it’s nice for newbies to create a document in a GUI not too dissimilar from a word processor, yet immediately benefit from content/style separation, excellent quality output, PDF support, and many other touches which Latex users are used to (decent float handling, bibliography support).
Tha said, I agree that getting stuck in with pure Latex code is the best approach for more substantial documents. The Getting to Grips with Latex tutorials are a good place to start: http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/
“Although [La]TeX proper does take a few minutes to learn, the extra time spent pays for itself very quickly.”
This is so true.
“If one really needs menus and a full development environment, TeXShop, Kile, and TeXnicCenter are much superior options.”
Actually, I’m writing a (small) book (in fact, a therapist’s manual) about autogenous training (a means of recreation). I use the mcedit Midnight Commander editor with syntax highlighting at 80×70, right next to an xterm with pdflatex && gv.
Development environments with menues are a good solution if you are not familiar with the LaTeX language elements in order to help learning the underlying concepts and methods. But soon you’ll see, you can work faster if you don’t use the GUI tools and use your favourite text editor.
Although [La]TeX proper does take a few minutes to learn…
A few “minutes”? I don’t think there’s a single soul on the face of the earth who can learn “[La]TeX proper” in a few minutes. I’ve been using LaTeX for years, and I still don’t consider myself to have mastered it. Nor do I have a yen to type all the control characters for a fair-sized matrix (say) when Lyx lets me simply move up & down through it.
I typed my doctoral dissertation using Lyx. It was quite a large dissertation, and I’m desperately glad I didn’t have to code it in native LaTeX. I had no problem splitting the document into sections, editing each section separately, incorporating them into a master document, referencing with BibTeX, etc. I actually had fun typing my dissertation, thanks to Lyx. I can’t think of anyone else in my department who said that.
Your strong aversion to Lyx baffles me. The interface is not monstrous at all; are you thinking of the former xforms interface? That wasn’t that all that bad either, quite frankly, but I hated it too.
I do have complaints about the interface, starting with the fact that the developers seem to take delight in substantially rearranging the menu layout with every dot-dot release (let alone every dot release!) but I cannot imagine calling it “monstrous blight”, especially in comparison to the programs you seem to prefer.
You’re both right and wrong on this. Yes, Lyx is probably not a particularly good pure LaTeX tool, and yes, other graphical tools are probably better at this, and maybe if you want to write LaTeX you should learn to write it by hand and really understand it.
However, for a writer, its not a LaTeX tool at all, and it doesn’t get judged on its merits as one. Its a tool for writing that happens to generate LaTeX, but which he/she would like equally well if it generated .doc files. Or even rtf files. Its the writing aids that are the real attraction – the separation of formatting and writing content.
You really have to see people try it. It takes about an afternoon to get them started and writing, and you have to follow up and be available for questions and demos for a while longer. Maybe sit in while they write seriously, and be available to show things, to get them through the early learning curve fast and easily. Though its no harder to support than OO in this respect. Do this, and what you will observe is people putting out 100 page plus documents properly structured with almost no effort, whereas before 30 pages was an effort and looked terrible.
There are some downsides to it. First, it is rather more technical to do some customizations. Second, tables are not well supported at all by comparison to any modern WP, as another poster points out. Third, drag and drop is non-existent (or was in the previous version). You were down to cut and paste, and you couldn’t use the TOC to move sections around. So its not perfect.
But in its ability to let someone write in a visible document structure with little effort, its a gem.
Does anyone know if there exists a good video tutorial on using Lyx? I would be interested to see some of the things described here “in action”…..
Another “visual” LaTex editor I found is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BaKoMa_TeX
And a nice LaTEX non-visual IDE is here: http://www.toolscenter.org/home.html
I’m compiling this in Kile/Tex-Live via Latex and the Memoir Class.
I look forward to testing the complete Volumes in LyX.
The current publication is over 5,000 pages.
Yes LaTeX can handle large publications.
I chose Kile when I wanted to get into more of LaTeX and typesetting.
LyX should have no problem managing this publication.
Edited 2007-02-27 20:07
You also can build lyx with gtk2 toolkit, just –enable-frontend=gtk (or so) in configure.
It’s not complete jet, but definitely usable at the moment.
LyX may have its limitations and may not be perfect for someone who already knows Latex, but working with LyX as a newbie and seeing the amazing results, I got very interested in typesetting and have actually bought myself a Latex book. Which I haven’t opened yet, but still
;];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];];]
But I need my embedded POWERPOINT slides
with the embedded Visio Diagrams
AND
I need the dancing elephants next to the title and the Animated Flashing WordArt.
:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:>}:> ;}:>}:>}:>}:>}
“But I need my embedded POWERPOINT slides
with the embedded Visio Diagrams
AND
I need the dancing elephants next to the title and the Animated Flashing WordArt. “
Sorry, but you’re missing the most important things, things nobody can live without!
You’ll need:
– interactive squeaking buttons flying around
– embedded “Flash” plugins
– sound files (playing more than 5 files simultaneously)
– the newest DOC files, containing a ZIPped PPT presentation with a RAR archive included, which contains a video that is to be played at startup
– fonts that you cannot read from distance
– no margins
– colours, colours, colours
– content to be loaded from the Internet dynamically
– more dancing puppies, birdies, kitties and other cute animals to make the project appealing to everyone, because everyone loves cute animals
– more moving, floating, transparent, overlapping, blinking, flashing, beeping and squeaking text.
And don’t forget to encrypt your project, forgetting the password afterwards. And hope all spectators suffer from ADHD.
Hmm, this package seems to do much what EasiWriter does on RISCOS http://www.iconsupport.demon.co.uk/Products/EasiWriter/EasiWriter_p…
Outside the ability to easily generate graphics within the same environment as a word processor, what does this do that InDesign/Quark/Scribus doesn’t?
I don’t know if you do much work with mathematics, but editing mathematics is easier with Lyx than with any word processor or desktop publisher I’ve ever used. It interfaces quite nicely with LaTeX, which sits on top of TeX, whose whole purpose was so Donald Knuth could write his textbooks on computer science (and he typed a lot of mathematics in the process).
My girlfriend wrote a college-level biology paper with Lyx. She got an A and the comment “nice formatting.” Enough said…
Browser: Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en)
[Off Topic Warning]
I admit it, I gave this person a +1 for surfing the web on a Nintendo WII. Way to go!
[Off Topic Warning]
I admit it, I gave this person a +1 for surfing the web on a Nintendo WII. Way to go!
Some people just scare me.
Browser: Firefox/4.00 (Sinclair ZX Spectrum; es)
Edited 2007-02-28 17:28
As I understand, one of the *big* advantages of LaTeX (and TeX, this is where “what you mean is what you get” originates, not in Lyx) is to get away of all those pull-down menus, GUI crap, etc, and instead you just type exactly what you want. So if I want to have an character ‘theta’, instead of fishing for a pull-down menu, then selecting theta from the pallette of greek letters, then realizing that the font does not quite match, bitching, etc, I simply type heta, and if I need to adjust the font I do it on a fly. Now LyX provides not-so-complete and often-clumsy GUI front-end to LaTeX. So we’re back to GUI. I simply don’t see any sense in that thing.
(using MikTeX and Emacs/AUCTEX for many years, mostly to typeset math papers)
“As I understand, one of the *big* advantages of LaTeX (and TeX, this is where “what you mean is what you get” originates, not in Lyx) is to get away of all those pull-down menus, GUI crap, etc, and instead you just type exactly what you want. So if I want to have an character ‘theta’, instead of fishing for a pull-down menu, then selecting theta from the pallette of greek letters, then realizing that the font does not quite match, bitching, etc, I simply type theta, and if I need to adjust the font I do it on a fly. Now LyX provides not-so-complete and often-clumsy GUI front-end to LaTeX. So we’re back to GUI. I simply don’t see any sense in that thing.”
GUI tools are more appealing to beginners who want to learn something about typesetting instead of just toying around. LyX teaches the concepts of document structure and the ability to concentrate on content, not on form (because form is implied by structure).
The GUI is good for learnung, for the case that you do not exactly know what you’re searching for. So you can try around and have something like WYSIWYG.
Sooner or later, users will say: “Uh, LyX is quite nice, but I want more control, and I don’t think I’ll need the GUI anymore.” Then they switch to “real” LaTeX and – wow! – the LaTeX concepts are known to them. Some also examine the LyX generated files and get a clue what LaTeX is about. Users who are familiar with HTML (a well known markup language) do not encounter serious problems using LaTeX’s macro conventions in order to bring structure to their content. It’s even not hard for programmers.
I had the following observations: People tend to think they need to increase font size, set bold attributes and have the chapter number in mind when they say: “I need a new heading here.”, instead of just typing the heading’s name and typesetting it “heading n’th degree” (chapter heading, section heading, subsection heading etc). LyX helps to learn how easy it can be.
Another concept is the use of a “partitioned document”, say, having chapters shared in different files. Wen we did a 3 person project at university, we used this technique along with CVS for submitting changes. Each person was working on a different file, but they all fitted together well, including references and all this “complicated” stuff.
As I understand, one of the *big* advantages of LaTeX (and TeX, this is where “what you mean is what you get” originates, not in Lyx) is to get away of all those pull-down menus, GUI crap, etc, and instead you just type exactly what you want.
You have your chronology quite backwards. Both TeX and LaTeX appeared before the Mac, and before X even, so computer scientists were still using vi and emacs on terminals. So TeX was certainly not designed for this, and it’s not an advantage at all, especially if you ever try to read some of the files associated with TeX. Cryptic, uncommented code and a bizarre choice of variable names, etc. are the order of the day. (AMSTeX, I’m talking about you.) Lyx isn’t going “back” to the GUI, it’s providing one for LaTeX.
So if I want to have an character ‘theta’, instead of fishing for a pull-down menu, then selecting theta from the pallette of greek letters…
If you want the character for theta in Lyx, just type enter math mode (CTRL-M or CTRL-Shift-M if you want math display mode), type theta and the spacebar, and the theta character appears. If you type thea by accident, the non-appearance of the Greek character makes it immediately clear that you mistyped it, unlike in a text editor. If you have preview.sty installed, the latest versions of Lyx will even show you what the math will look like on paper, including macro expansion, equation numbering, and so forth. You can ask Lyx to display toolbars of commonly used commands, so you don’t have to type and retype left[right] or even more fun left{right} (don’t forget the backslash before those braces!!!), but press one button and the delimiters just appear[/i], in math mode no less (in case you weren’t already in math mode).
Edit: Case in point, OSAlert doesn’t pass the necessary braces through, although I typed them.
Edited 2007-02-28 16:00