Lyx

Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 29, 2006 at 07:21 PM

While I am on a roll here, I have just installed Lyx after the discussion on text programs in the earlier thread.

Installation on Windows is a little bit of a chore as it needs to download several additional programs to get it going, such as Ghost View.

So far it has been an interesting experience as it is only partially WYSIWYG, with each part of the doc being set up using styles. It comes with many different styles and apparently is really easy to use if you can stick with the built in styles, but creating your own styles is difficult.

It is however, fascinating throwing sentences together, without thinking about layout or formatting, and then seeing a perfectly formatted professionally typeset document printing out. While its running its only using 4000kb of memory and everything seems to work very quickly.

An interesting discovery was some Perl script on the Brainstorm forum that converts Brainstorm models into a formatted Latex file which seems to show some promise of an attractive Brainstorm.Lyx partnership. However Lyx isn’t pure Latex.

I have been playing with Open Office for a while, but it seems to be only marginally better than Word and I haven’t really felt it was worth the effort, but Lyx looks really useful and a big step up from Word for the sort of writing I do.

I would be interested to hear if anyone else has had a go with Lyx.

Graham