[plug] Star Office and 5.1 and the registration

[Christian]

Peter Wright wrote:

> > After such a strong response from so many people I guess I have no option
> > other than to give the thing a look. :)  I upgraded tetex on a couple of
> > my machines and also downloaded LyX.  The impression I get from the basic
> > LaTeX docs I've read so far (thanks to Bret for the loan of the book)
> 
> I pretty much learned everything I know about LaTeX from "A Short Guide to
> LaTeX 2e", which should be included in your tetex documentation. Good free
> docs are a wonderful thing :).

Yes, they are. :)  I will have to have a look through that doc then -
thanks for the tip. :)

> > I can't honestly see myself writing 80 pages of thesis in a text editor
> > and embedding in the necessary markup codes to make it look a certain
> > way.  Not because of learning the new "language" but simply because I
> > would be spending more time thinking about how it was going to look and I
> > would be distracted from what I was really trying to say.
> 
> Ahh, but that's where you've missed the point, albeit slightly :).
> You're not supposed to think too much about how it's going to look - just
> concentrate on the writing and the structure of said writing.

Ahhh... I begin to see what you mean. :)  I spent a few hours playing
with LyX and working through the tutorial and the concept of not
thinking about how things are going to look but merely telling the
computer what they represent and letting it do the rest has definitely
begun to appeal to me. :)  However if you want to change the default
environments/formats slightly or if you want to skim through the
document immediately picking out each section and subsection etc. then
having a WYSIWYG interface can't be beaten.  Anyway, I'm going to write
my next research paper in LyX and if that goes well then I'll likely do
the thesis in it too.  From what I understand, if LyX doesn't entirely
match my requirements then I can switch to LaTeX (or even embed LaTeX
commands into LyX) as is necessary.

> Yeah - Xforms I believe - it certainly ain't too pretty when compared to
> Qt or gtk or Tk or motif. However, it's a lot prettier than the Athena
> widget set, and there are a lot of very useful X apps that use that w/set.
> Once you get past the initial "urgh" instinct, you find it's quite usable,
> and you quickly get used to it.

I'm sorry, did you just call Motif "pretty"? :P  Actually, I like Xforms
more than Motif for looks but some of the behaviour of the Xforms
widgets is sometimes rather odd.  With the Athena widgets, there have
been plenty of substitute libraries written which improve their
appearance and behaviour a lot so it's not really an issue nowadays.

> > but if it can give me some sort of WYSISYG front-end to TeX's power then
> > that will probably be an acceptable compromise.
> 
> I haven't used LyX for anything serious, but the reports I've read indicate
> that it is a pretty good compromise.