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Lyx
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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
Posted by Tom S.
Dec 30, 2006 at 02:43 PM
Graham Smith wrote:
>I would be
>interested to hear if anyone else has had a go with Lyx.
I did try this some time ago when I was still using linux. In the end, I found it easier to just use LaTeX in Emacs, as it gave me more control over the document. Its really not that bad once you get a couple templates set up with all of the correct headings in the preamble. Many of those documents were long, graphics-filled and heavy-duty, though, and LyX might be better for shorter, simpler documents and for outlines and such.
I finally broke down and went MS after being asked one too many times to convert a document to Word for publicaiton. I don’t have the kind of time it takes to do that any more. It’s a shame. Word is fine once you learn how to use the functionality but the LaTeX documents look better and, as I stated above, I always felt like I had more control over the document.
Tom S.
Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 30, 2006 at 03:35 PM
Tom
>In the end, I found it easier to just use LaTeX in Emacs,
That is interesting as until finding Lyx I had always been put off Latex by the work it seemed to entail.
>Many of those documents were long, graphics-filled and heavy-duty, though, and LyX might be better for shorter, simpler >documents and for outlines and such.
I am generally looking at 40 to 100 pages with between 25 and 100 charts or figures
>I finally broke down and went MS after being asked one too many times to convert a document to Word for publicaiton.
My problem most of the time I am collaborating with other people and everyone uses Word, but equally I publish my own reports and my brief foray into Lyx has impressed me at how easy it is to get high quality output, with little effort. As an aside, for both our last book and the one that we are doing now, Springer offered Word or Latex templates for us to work with.
>Word is fine once you learn how to use the functionality
I really don’t like Word, I seem to always have some annoying problem every time I use it. However, it is no where near as bad as people say it is, and most of the problems are a result of not knowing how to use it.
None the less, it still warrants the label of being the most annoying program I have ever used, and I would love to say goodbye to it.
Thanks for the reply, maybe I will have a look at the other Latex options, now having gained a bit of confidence with Lyx, and indeed HTML, so a mark up approach doesn’t seem so daunting as it did a year ago.
Graham
Posted by Cassius
Dec 30, 2006 at 07:20 PM
Graham Smith wrote:
>>Word is fine once you learn how to use the functionality
>
>I really don’t like Word, I seem to always have some annoying problem every time I use it. However, it is no where near as bad as people say it is, and most of the problems are a result of not knowing how to use it.
>
>None the less, it still warrants the label of being the most annoying program I have ever used, and I would love to say goodbye to it.
>
>Graham
======================================
MS WORD can be a pain, or worse. Here are some problems and suggestions that most people in this forum no doubt already know. (Have you noticed the high intellect of the members?):
1. Files can become corrupted. One small corruption can infect the entire document. I know of a case where several people contributed chapters to a document. When they were combined, a corruption in one contribution corrupted the entire document. The editor ended up retyping the entire thing.
SUGGESTION: a) Every time you save, save under a new, sequential name. b) If your material is to be combined with others, have the editor/coordinator frequently combine the contributors’ drafts. This way, if a corruption occurs, it will be caught early, and contributors will have less of a burden backtracking versions to find the problem. c) If what you are writing is long, write it separate parts/files.
2. Sending a WORD file as an email attachment can change it! If your recipient is close, it’s better to hand-carry the digital file. Otherwise, send a zipped version of the file. Hopefully, any corruption/change will make the file unreadable. Among the email-generated changes I’ve noted are changes in style, headings, and punctuation, which could only be found by re-reading the entire recipient’s version of the document.
3. Turn off all of WORD’s “helpful” automatic features.
4. Create keyboard macros for things you do frequently & that are a pain to do. I did this for creating tables of contents, etc.
5. Customize your toolbars.
-c
Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 30, 2006 at 08:20 PM
Cassius :
>Here are some problems and suggestions that most people in this forum…
The most important lesson is to do everything with styles. We solved most of our problems by me creating templates with styles for all of our needs, and staff were banned from using any manual formatting.
But we never solved the more bizarre problems like printing a proof of a report,checking it was OK and then, without doing anything except hitting the print button again, print 50 copies to find that a table now had a page break through it.
And I shall stop with that example for I can go on for pages describing my Word experiences, and it just gets me annoyed.
Graham