[plug] LyX/LaTeX questions

[blockley at environ.wa.gov.au]

Hi All,

I have used Lyx but not Scientific Word though I have heard people
having problems with it.  Lyx is quite good in that it retains the
typesetting philosophy of Latex and allows you to worry about the
content of your document rather than the look.  As I remember the
designers of Lyx talk about it as a "What you see is what you mean"
word processor rather than a WYSIWYG.  It has an option to output your
document as clean Latex output.  I've used it mainly to write a few
letters and small documents but prefer to write native Latex for large 
projects like my thesis as it gives me a little more control.

I was going to fire up lyx last night to see if there was an easy way
to fix the hyphenation problem but didn't get the time in the end.  I
Might have another go tonight.  I do agree with Christian though that
Lyx is nice.

Cheers

Adrian 

On  3 Nov, Greg Gamble wrote:
> Hi Christian,
> 
>> > Not having used LyX, I don't understand the interaction
>> > LyX/LaTeX. How does it work?
>> 
>> Basically it's a GUI front-end.  You don't have to write the LaTeX code
>> yourself in about 95% of common cases, you can just interact with it
>> very much like a normal word processor.  For example, environments are
>> selected from a combo box much like styles in WordPerfect et al. and
>> you select the text to bold, emphasise it etc.  It also gives you some
>> vague idea of what it will look like which makes things easier in a lot of
>> cases.  It certainly makes LaTeX a lot more accessible and since you can
>> add in raw LaTeX code too it's still reasonably flexible.  It's a really
>> nice program. :-)
> 
> Oh, ok ... it sounds a bit like ScientificWord. I hope LyX does a
> better job. The problem with ScientificWord is that it tries to give
> you the WYSIWYG feel of the usual word processors ... and does things
> like put explicit spacing in tables, (lots of \<space>s everywhere)
> which goes against the whole idea of TeX/LaTeX which calculates where
> to put things ... and in general does a much better job than a human
> can do by eye. 
   

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