Anyone use lyx?

[Guest BooYah]

I just downloaded it and played around with it for a little bit. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like OpenOffice runs rings around it.

 

If anyone here uses this a lot, could you tell me somethings you like about it?

[aRTee]

Lyx is not a wordprocessor, it is a textprocessor.

 

Don't compare that to OOo or MSWord.

 

It uses Latex as a backend, you may want to google for latex.

 

Looks are deceiving, don't look at lyx, look at the final output.

 

There is no better printed output than that of Latex (which works with a coded language, like html), for which lyx is a nice frontend.

 

It is not (so much) for short letters or so, but if you are making a whole book, you'll be happy if you don't have to babysit the program and tell it every time how you want things. With latex / lyx your document will be consistent and there's no problems with hundreds of pages (unlike in MSWord that gets in trouble after page 10 or so..).

 

And no, I don't really use it, I use OOo writer. But I don't do any large documents. I will (re)do one (55 pages) soon however, and I will definitely use lyx for that.

 

In terms of quality of output, lyx/latex run rings around any other typesetting/document creation program that I know of. Including OOo, MSOffice, CorelOffice and FrameMaker (that I use on a daily basis). (Well, maybe not really 'rings' around FM quality..)

 

Less than 10 page document? Use OOowriter. More? Give lyx+latex a go.

Your invested time will be well worth it.

[aru]

I suscribe what aRTee has said

 

I used to write in latex my class notes, through emacs long time ago, and now through vim (no more class notes but letters and such stuff). I played for a while with lyx but I didn't like it because it reminded me too much the feeling of a text processor (which is not, ofcouse).

 

While lyx helps a lot in embedding images into latex documents, I found that if you want speed when writting is better to write plain rough latex. Once you get the basic tags you won't care anymore in how will be the look and feeling of your text, you'll just type and print (or save as dvi, ps, pdf, html...) when you finish, getting a very professional document at the end.

 

btw, did you know that Lyx was writen by Matthias Ettrich? Yes, the guy that later started the KDE project.

[Guest BooYah]

Thanks guys. You've definetly sparked some curiosity in me. I'll play with lyx/latex when I have time.

 

It is not (so much) for short letters or so, but if you are making a whole book, you'll be happy if you don't have to babysit the program and tell it every time how you want things. With latex / lyx your document will be consistent and there's no problems with hundreds of pages (unlike in MSWord that gets in trouble after page 10 or so..).

 

Do you guys use the stylist in OO? Doesn't it do the same thing? Meaning you, just type-away and apply styles as you go?

 

I gotta go get some more ink before I do a print quality comparison...

[Glitz]

To get an idea of the quality of latex output you can preview the tutorial or manual. Doing the tutorial is a really great way to get the hang of it.

 

I used StarOffice 5.2 to write my master's thesis (185 pages and 58MB) and towards the end it started becoming a nightmare. It did manage to do the job finally but it took a lot of coaxing. Mind you I did do everything "by the book". I used style sheets to set it up. I created a master document with each chapter in its own file. DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE...IT DOESN'T WORK PROPERLY!!! And I set it up to automatically generate the indexes. I found that in master document mode it gets confused easily and often will crosslink your links (ie. mix up references to equation numbers or figures) not to mention totally messing up the formatting of any pages with large figures in them. The bibliographic database did work well, however, and it generated the correct table of contents, list of figures, list of tables, and references. The trick there is to generate them first, then go through every page to make sure the formatting is correct, and finally generate the indexes again.

 

I did help a friend write her thesis using MSWord. It was a shorter document but no less painful to write. She forgot to group the elements of her diagrams together and they tended to "explode" all throughout her document. It's particularly bad if you can't find and remove all the pieces and then discover them later on embedded in the middle of a paragraph 13 pages from where the diagram once was. And try sticking half decent equation numbering in there. Heck, even wordperfect for DOS could do that. All-in-all, it was just as hard as using StarOffice only the problems were in different areas.

 

 

Glitz.

[Guest jwl]

I am a writer, and I have used LyX and OpenOffice writer.

 

At the moment, I prefer OpenOffice writer. However, for long documents, I agree it's tough to beat LyX.

 

Benefits of LyX: it's simple. You don't have to think about formatting. You just write. As a result, you tend to work more efficiently and quickly, because you aren't distracted by layout concerns.

 

Drawbacks of LyX: it's very hard for a newbie to customize a document's appearance. It's especially hard if you don't know LaTeX. When I wrote my thesis for school I used LyX. It worked fine, and I was able to make modifications as needed. The LyX users listserv is very helpful in that regard, as is this page.

 

Benefits of OOW: it's a word processor, so you can make everything look (more or less) exactly how you want it. This of course takes time, and could detract from the actual writing. Also, with the stylist, one can approximate the efficiency of LyX/LaTeX when you have a template that is to your liking.

 

Drawbacks of OOW: it's bloated, especially when compared to LyX. It's slow. It doesn't handle large documents as well.

 

I suggest you give LyX a good, honest try by (for example) using it exclusively for a month. It's a different mindset, but you really do write faster once you're in the mindset.[/url]

[Guest jwl]

Here are three reasons I prefer OpenOffice.org Writer 1.0.3 to LyX 1.3.1qt as a writing tool:

 

• 1. OOoW allows me to customize the appearance of my documents. Though LyX output is neat and clean, it is also boring. Even getting TrueType fonts to work requires some LaTeX wizardry.

 

2. OOoW saves to all the file formats I need, which are native (.sdw), PDF for wide distribution (this will be even better in 1.1), HTML, .txt. It also will open ms file formats for when some yahoo sends me a word attachment.

 

3. The 'stylist' works very well, approximating many benefits of LyX/LaTeX. I learned to think of documents in terms of structure using LyX. Now I can implement that same way of thinking in OOoW using the stylist. But in OOoW, each style is much more easily customizable. Therefore: if you like to pay attention to the aesthetics of document formatting and you take steps to be creative and interesting, OOoW is the way to go. However, if you don't care about formatting, and want the computer to intelligently take care of formatting for you, then definitely go with LyX. It's stock output is as clean as you can get.

[coverup]

You should ask yourself, who's your audience. If it's one or two "yahoos" who use msoffice and they must be able to edit the document, go for OO.o. If you work on a book or a journal/conference paper, the publisher may not appreciate your creativity when it comes to formatting. LaTeX performs formatting according to publishing standards. Take hyphens, for example. MSWord and the likes are just hopeless... Someone mentioned truetype fonts for LaTeX, that's just another example. Why would you want to use them, publishing standard is usually Type1. I happen to see conference papers prepared using truetype fonts, they look very odd and unprofessional...