What's Needed for Layout
Your author is almost certainly going to have to submit paper copies of his/her work, so they must be able to lay it out for printing in a way that looks decent. It is not going to be possible to offer the output of the typical text editor. This is where Lyx shines, as long as you are happy to adopt the layouts that come with the program as your own. If you want to customize them, you enter a world in which the level of work is going to be quite out of proportion to the benefits for the average user. OO and KWord on the other hand are WISYWG authoring tools, and will permit a high degree of customization by point and click, select and format. The results are not as professional as with Lyx.
Other Considerations
Export/Import formats. It is essential to be able to generate and import documents in standard format that other people can use. Your author may well be engaged in collaborative working, in which drafts are submitted for comment, or sections written by other people are received and must be incorporated into his/her work. One surprisingly desirable feature in this connection, is the ability to lock documents to ensure that unauthorised changes are not made. Industrial strength locking is probably not needed, but the ability to generate PDF files which can then be read by anyone, but not changed without deliberate cracking efforts, is essential. Both Lyx, KWord and OO support this. OO also will export in .doc or .rtf or simple text format. Lyx will also export in ASCII, LaTex, or Postscript, but not .doc or .rtf. Kate and Leo only support text. You must also be able to submit files for publication in a form that the publisher will accept, which mostly seems to mean .doc, but Postcript will be generally acceptable.
The Applications
1. Lyx
Lyx is a gui front end to LaTex. LaTex will be completely forbidding to our target audience, but Lyx does an excellent job of concealing LaTex complexity. To use it at a basic level is very simple. All you do is start up a new document, set its type, or class, from the Layout>Document menu, pick the formatting of your text from the Description menu, and write. You can pick the usual kinds of formatting: numbered lists, bulleted lists, bibliograhy format, section, sub section, sub sub section. As you move through the document, you can write your headers and subsections in advance in accordance with the outline plan, and navigate through them with the navigator either as a floating window or as a popup and step through series of menus to write the content. When you are done writing, you view what you have written either as DVI or PDF. The results are uniformly professional looking. Lyx seems to have a reputation for difficulty, but if used like this it is not merited. Footnotes and citations are inserted from the Insert menu. Emphasis is done from the keyboard or from the Layout menu. Citations and cross references are supported. Marginal notes can be inserted. All in all, Lyx gives you the greatest power of any of the applications considered to mark your document for publication in accordance with how bits of it function.
One aspect of Lyx which needs careful explanation is the separation between layout and structure. For example, in Lyx, if you hit the spacebar twice or three times, only one space appears between words. This is because the space bar simply tells the system it has reached the end of a word. Spacing between words are set up later, in typesetting, and happen automagically. Similarly, hitting enter ten times results in a new paragraph with no more space between it and the previous one, than if one had hit enter once. Spacing between paragraphs occurs in another part of the wood.
There are drawbacks to Lyx.
Don't try to change the predetermined format! For example, if you have picked a list format, then each paragraph will be a new list element. Now, you may want to have two paragraphs to one list element. You can't. Or not without getting deep into LaTex. Its not the end of the world, you can figure workarounds, but it is a factor.
When exporting, while the export to ASCII is instant, and the result is readable in any text editor, you get zero formatting. Lists will end up preceded by asterixs. Footnotes will just appear in the body of the text. Export to HTML and PDF is easy (you do need to install latex2html, and then reconfigure Lyx).
