Submitted by “In the hubbub over the ODF and competing ‘what you see is what you get’ word processors, a long-standing alternative model of word processing systems has been mostly overlooked. The author of LyX, Matthias Ettrich, calls this approach ‘what you see is what you mean’. However, it’s a philosophy that you will find in many ‘native’ free software text-processing systems everywhere, from online ‘content management systems’ to book publishing. You write what you mean, then you use some type of formatter to create presentation layouts. LyX, with its integrated graphical environment, may be the friendliest place to learn it.”
I’ve been using LyX for YEARS to write all my school reports and other important documents that I want to look GOOD.
Seriously. One time, 4 ppl (including me) were doing a project, and we each had our part of the final document to write. Try to bring that together from MS Word to MS Word and combine it… It was pain for 2 hours till I told em “let’s save it all in text, I’m gonna put it together in LyX in 30 minutes flat”.
Took me 29 minutes, including spellchecking, and they were all impressed at how professional the end result looked. Ever since, other word processors have always been inferior, for me, except for some tasks where they are simply faster/easier.
I agree. LyX is very nice for document processing; the result can look stunning. For most manuscripts, reports and books, LyX is IMHO the quickest way to get a beautifully and consistently formatted document. And the within-document automatic reference system is superb.
But I have encountered some *small* problems with image positioning, page numbering and weird text management (e.g. a long web adress can run out from the paragraph and off the page instead of being splitted into two parts). Also, producing big tables can be a bit of a pain, and of course there is no spreadsheet mathematics functionality in those tables. Finally, the built-in pdf export function of the versions I’ve tried generates fairly low-res pdfs with the text letters being a bit “wobbly”, so I have instead been using the tex2pdf perl script developed by Steffen Evers over at http://tex2pdf.berlios.de/ (is that domain dead?), which generates great pdf’s with indeces and clickable internal and external references. A great companion script for LyX.
Two questions:
But does anyone know where you can find and download more styles? I looked around some year ago to find more scientific article style templates but couldn’t really find much…
Does anyone know of a good reference manager that integrates with LyX? I mean something like JabRef or, though very much not GPL, EndNote.
Actually JabRef works well with LyX, you just have to set the Lyx-pipe in your preferences.
Not to take anything away from latex or LyX, but this sounds like a case of not knowing how to use Word effectively. Merging heterogeneous documents into a common style is not any harder with Word than with LyX. The approach is the same: strip out all the formatting and then apply styles consistently.
I am constantly surprised to meet people who have been using Word daily for many years and still don’t have the slightest idea how to use styles.
Merging heterogeneous documents into a common style is not any harder with Word than with LyX.
Could be, I don’t really know. Tex/Latex was invented for mathematical typesetting and it excels at that. The formula facilities of MsWord, while greatly improved over the original lack thereof, aren’t as versatile nor do they produce as good looking output.
The other part of the argument, that Latex tags indicate formating intent and leave the details up to the software, is a valid point. There is no good reason except design history and the typewriter heritage to embed indentation amounts, tab settings, typesizes, and other such nonsense into the document; it involves the writer too much in the formatting details. The absence of such embedded information is what is meant by “what you mean” as opposed to “what you see”. You just tell the software that you want a subheading and it takes care of capitalization, size, face, and style when it is time to produce output. In this it somewhat resembles HTML.
> Latex tags indicate formating intent and leave
> the details up to the software.
Just like Word styles.
> You just tell the software that you want a subheading
> and it takes care of capitalization, size, face, and
> style when it is time to produce output. In this it
> somewhat resembles HTML.
Isn’t that exactly how styles work?
> There is no good reason except design history and
> the typewriter heritage to embed indentation
> amounts, tab settings, typesizes, and other such
> nonsense into the document”
Except that if style information is not in the document, it can get easily get separated and lost. I think what you mean is that content and formatting information should be LOGICALLY separated. Of course they should, which is why every serious word processor in the last 20 years has supported styles.
Correctly used, Word is also a “What you get is what you mean” word processor. My point was that few people bother to learn to use their word processor effectively.
Except that if style information is not in the document, it can get easily get separated and lost.
You miss the point. The style information is *not* part of the document and that is a good thing. Rather, the style is defined separately and the same document can be typeset in different styles. Publications typically have a preferred document and bibliography style — IEEE Letters, AGU, MIT Thesis, etc. — and you just have to indicate which one to use and out it comes, double spaced for proofreading, or looking like a preprint, or whatever. The separation of style and content was quite deliberate and has its own virtues. There are a number of standard styles out there that are available online or with the Latex distribution and there is really little point in inventing your own. That is the point.
Well, of course Word and friends all let you specify that some text is a headline, some other a subsection or normal paragraph text, a footnote and so on, but there are other typesetting features that comes with LyX/LaTeX that are brilliant. Like how it keeps track of figures and page numbers: figure numbers are dynamic – change the order of your numbered figures and the numbers are automatically updated, and so are your in-text references to your figures; references to particular page numbers in the document are also dynamic. Moreover, IIRC the pages can be rendered according to readability: a line should hold a certain number of letters/words to be easily readable – up the fontsize and the paragraph becomes a bit wider (instead of having the margins fixed as in a WP).
Correctly used, Word is also a “What you get is what you mean” word processor. My point was that few people bother to learn to use their word processor effectively.
Perhaps it was only a rumour, but I remember having read that a Microsoft representative once said that MS-Word was completely flawless as long as you use it exactly as intended. However, he didn’t mentioned how it should be used or why it can be used in unintended ways. I hope it didn’t involved a purchase from Microsoft Press…
I guess you’re right on WYGIWYM if you ever find how to use it exactly as intended… and as long as those AutoCompletion/AutoCorrection/SmartTags features are turned off! They must be the complete opposite of WYGIWYM…
Not that OOo is better, though. Never tried LyX, but I rather enjoy LaTeX, even if it’s a real PITA to set up tables.
Correctly used, Word is also a “What you get is what you mean” word processor. My point was that few people bother to learn to use their word processor effectively.
This isn’t really true, and it might be that you haven’t used Lyx or similar, or not enough. Look at spaces and line feeds as an example and you’ll see why. In Lyx if you enter two spaces one after the other, the second time, the cursor doesn’t move and the spacing doesn’t change. If you do 10 line feeds, you do not insert any spaces. Now in Word or any WYSIWYG word processor, you will get extra spaces and empty lines. In a similar vein, the tab key in Lyx does nothing at all. In Word and similar, it positions the text. Footnotes in Lyx appear in the body of the document as you write. In Word, you see them where they will be at the foot, formatted as they will be when printed. Of course, they come out at the foot when you print from Lyx.
Styles don’t make up this difference. They apply styles to what you have typed, and what you have typed includes formatting.
This is because of a completely different approach. Lyx says, when it sees a space typed, OK, end of word. When it sees the second one, it says, I know already. Similarly the line feed is an end of para marker. You don’t need to tell it twice. The tab key is useless because it will take care of positioning text itself, you cannot do that while typing. The footnote style in Lyx means, when you print, put this thing at the bottom of the page. But for now, keep it where I can see it.
Its this that liberates the author. The problem with word processors is exactly that you cannot get away from formatting to some extent as you write.
Take headings. Do you pick Heading 1 because you want Helvetica 18? Or do you pick it because what you are now typing is logically Heading 1 and has subheadings which will be 2 3 or 4? And what do you do if you would rather like Heading 1 to be Times 14, but Times 14 is Heading 3?
See the problem? You can’t, or at least its very hard, in Word or OO to write and name what you are writing as a logical part, without also formatting it, which you neither need nor want to do at this point.
This is why I say that LaTex is almost incidental for the writer using Lyx. It could just as well generate .doc or .rtf files. The critical thing for the writer is the lack of formatting as you write, but the insistence on everything you write being classified as a logical part of your document.
Completely! For letters – word processor of your choice. For theses, books, any long work – definitely LyX.
OK, purists may prefer LaTeX, but as an artist/writer I like a GUI (you can’t really do much image manipulation on a command line of any sort) – usually I just bang text out in a text editor first anyway, then, depending on usage it’s into an HTML editor, or Scribus, or LyX – depends om final usage.
You have no clue. Word works fine for largely text documents. Even ones that are well divided and don’t interwork.
But the second you start doing things like continuing numbers and a lot of large images you end up with crap… Word does not handle this well, and it’s a royal PITA to merge a large document.
But the biggest disadvantage to Word is that it doesn’t work with source control, for me. Obviously most people don’t care about this. But some do, and this is one place where plaintext based tools are wonderful.
You may be right that I have no clue, but if you actually read what I wrote you will see that I made no criticism of LaTeX or LyX. For any kind of mathematical work it is definitely the way to go. However, you are wrong that Word does not handle large images or “continuing numbers” (by which I assume you mean having control of line numbering of sections), you just have to learn how to do it. Most people don’t bother to learn to use Word effectively, and that was what I was criticising.
Word does not handle large amounts of large images well enough.
Think of a document with a huge text body (like 150 pages of pure text). Now insert a high-quality picture (1MB) into each page. You end up with probably 250 pages, at least theoretically. Practically Word has no chance of handling such a document (sub-documents may be possible, but are a real pain).
LaTeX can handle such a document easily, simply because of separation of pictures and text during writing. LaTeX is not only better for mathematical work, it is better for anything Word can’t handle due to size reasons. I personally am familiar with LaTeX (took me 3 weeks to learn), and I prefer it over OOo as soon as I have to write more than 10 pages. You should try it definitely if you have to write a thesis or similarly large things. The time it takes to learn is really well spent.
The two biggest problems with Word is that its opaque, and its buggy. It’s very hard to get a feeling for exactly why Word does what it does, especially when tables or graphics are involved. I use Word sometimes when writing reports that involve data from Excel (path of least resistance), and sometimes it’ll just randomly start spacing some captions differently than other capations. I have know idea why, and after months I’ve never been able to figure out. When it happens, I always just start a new document, and copy-and-paste everything over, and that fixes it.
Yes I certainly agree that Word is opaque and buggy. I’ll never understand how Word ever pushed WordPerfect out of its dominant position in the market.
I’ll never understand how Word ever pushed WordPerfect out of its dominant position in the market.
It’s a rather simple explanation, it was called WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows. It was so unbelievable crappy, and 5.2 and 6.0 was not much better. Besides the competition at the time, Word 2.0 is probably overall the best version Microsoft has made.
LyX is not for your day-to-day word processign needs. In my experience i found out that its still good to use some wordprocessors like OpenOffice/Abiword for smaller, and faster, things.
However, if you have a big document then forget those and use LyX.
I’m starting now my internship report, and i’ve just downloaded the latest version of LyX
While it’s not suitable for letters and posters, Lyx is an excellent choice for large structured documents. For academic reports there is no equal: it’s got excellent support for bibliographies, diagram placement, formulae and in-document references.
The current Lyx GUI does have issues, though, in terms of usability. A lot of stuff is still hanging around from the Motif days. For example there are a couple of ideas in the likes of Kile which it would be nice to see in Lyx, but that’s not going to happen soon. That said, once you get your head around its idiosyncracies, you’ll find that you can write documents at an impressive speed.
For Windows users, this installer is the best way to get started: http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/LyXWinInstaller
As a companion to Lyx, you can use JabRef (http://jabref.sourceforge.net/) to maintain your bibliography database in the Bibtex format.
Edited 2006-05-21 16:38
“This means that table typesetting natively in LyX can be pretty painful. Perhaps someday this will be fixed. In the meantime, however, I find that it’s usually more efficient to produce tables in a vector graphic program, and import the Postscript output as a graphic.”
What software can be used specifically for this matter? Scribus, Inkscape???
I never thought of creating tables with these tools. It’s actually a big problem that I have because my reports always include very big and long tables. Maybe a table could be created in openoffice, imported in scribus for finally being imported into LaTeX? Someone tried that already?
LyX is to [La]TeX what Frontpage Express is to HTML, only much worse. The GUI is absolutely atrocious, not giving you any semblence of real control and burying common functions several layers down in a hierarchy of menus and dialog boxes. Even worse, the output is in an obfuscated, incompatible variant of LaTeX.
You’d be much happier using pure LaTeX and a decent editor (Kile, vim, etc.).
Yes, probably if your object is to create LaTex, that is true. However, if your object is to write and have something or someone take care of formatting, it definitely is not.
The point about Lyx is not that it generates LaTex – that is incidental, and it could do its typesetting any way it wanted. The point is that you can write while indicating to the package what the logical structure of the document is, separately from having to worry about how it is going to look on paper. By logical structure, I mean, is this a chapter, a subheading, a footnote, a bibliography…etc.
This is what refugees from word processing find so liberating, and they would never in a million years manage Kile or Vim.
Texmacs might be a compromise? But it too may generate horrible LaTex
definatly stick to TeX.
In my opinion…
TeX is like C
LaTeX is like C++
Lyx should be like Basic (surprise ! you were expecting C#, right ?)
I mean…
1) WYSIWYG math editor
2) GUI to have access to functions…
Any journeyman TeX user will tell you that those aren’t features, they are drawbacks :
you can type pages full of complicated formulas a lot faster and easier with a keyboard and TeX than with a keyboard, a mouse and lyx…
Yet, LyX has a very good point :
1) it brings LaTeX to the unknowing masses
(to the users who can’t/don’t want to learn LaTeX)
2) it is the first and easy step of a journey from word to latex (a few lyX users will switch to latex eventually).
The point is that you can write while indicating to the package what the logical structure of the document is, separately from having to worry about how it is going to look on paper. By logical structure, I mean, is this a chapter, a subheading, a footnote, a bibliography…etc.
But that is just ordinary Latex, Lyx adds nothing there but a Latex gui interface. Other choices are Kile or Vim, both of which I found more congenial than Lyx, and I like the fact that they produce standard Latex files. Standards are good. But really, I don’t think it matters much, use what works for you.
Chuck, I think its a different context and a different sort of user that is the issue.
Say you have liberal arts people who ‘just want to write’. Suppose they are writing papers about history with a few graphical inserts, or maybe short stories or novels or opinion pieces. Now, at some point they embark on something long, and something that has formatting requirements.
Its the psychology of how they work. If you give them something with tags and highlights, they will run a mile. If you give them vi they will hit you! If you give them Word or OO on the other hand, you’ll go back and find they have written something full of tabs and spaces and line feeds in the desperate effort to do formatting without really knowing how.
They are not at all stupid, but they are a bit like a social worker using a car – they just want to get there.
Now, you give them Lyx, and suddenly all that goes away and they can write. Once they have confidence that the end result is going to look good, they stop thinking about it, stop fighting layout, and ‘just write’.
Anyway, that’s my experience with this particular type of writer. Of course, more technical or computer literate writers will find it too restricting, and you’re quite right, its different applications for different groups of people.
i’ve been using Lyx for many years. its solid, stable and handles large documents with large numbers of diagrams and other inserts easily. its fast simple and does what it does very well.
msword in comparison is a pain. watch your on-disk filesizes grow, watch it mess with styles and style-codes, watch it crash and cirrput with large documents and large numbers of inserts.
there is *still* no good reliable way of inserting vector graphics from external sources into msword- svg, ps, eps, forget it. even ms native wmf and ewmf is a gamble.
forget latex/tex – you don’t need to know its there if you wat to use lyx. if you want to get advanced, sure go ahead.
someone asked about a reference manager – i’ve always found pybliogrpaher to work very well.
my only gripe with lyx is that different styles are not userfriendly – they originate in the ancient caves of maths publications and are not that relevant to most home users. even the so-called foils or presentation styles are not that friendly.
i’d recommend lyx as a source for generating html, pdf, and other types. the standard is open, and its compressed xml anyway so you can always do it yourself.
I’ve been using this thing called BakomaTeX for a while now and I have to say I’ve been blown away by it. Its got a full blown LaTeX IDE but you can also load up a real-time LaTeX editor.. as you type the code you see the results rendered instantly, or you can type into the render window and have it generate the code – magic!! Unfortunately it’s commercial but I was that impressed I stumped up for it, and it turned out to be worthwhile.
Magic!! Don’t advertise your product using subterfuging with an account whose single and only comment ever is an advertisement for your product.
Nonsense! Please do advertise any relevant products.
BTW, I tried (30-day free) Bakoma and it failed to compile 90% of my LaTeX documents – some failed to open because they were not LaTeX2E, and other didn’t display the visual window for whatever reasons. Otherwise than that, it seems to be indeed the only LaTeX editor that offers real-time simultaneous access to both code- and visual-editing/viewing of LaTeX documents, which are used with pure LaTeX code files. I’ve been looking for something like that (except working) for over 20 years. The program is a pure common sense, just needs some more competition from others and some more exposure/advertising so that the others find out what’s possible to do…
I’ll never understand how Word ever pushed WordPerfect out of its dominant position in the market.
Last time I looked Wordperfect was still the dominant word processor in legal firms. That may have changed recently, but it is one of those curious things.
is like umbrella to fish. Utterly useless and defeats the whole philosophy is LaTeX – get exactly what you mean, directly, without navigating through the less than intuitive GUI. If anyone claims how much they like LyX, it is only because they’ve never tried to use LaTeX in a first place.
What you really need for productivity is a good LaTeX editor. I’ve tried many and found Emacs + AUCTEX is the most reliable. The latest version of AUCTEX incorporate visualizer (so you can see on fly what you would be getting, I haven’t tried that) and, as I understand, finally comes bundled with Emacs. Other than that, my primary motivation moving to LaTeX was to avoid navigating through less-than-intuitive menus of (put the name of any WYSIWYG processor of your (dis)liking), and it was not just the matter of formulas. One of the major attractions of LaTeX is the way how it treats the imported graphics/charts/pictures etc. No drag and drop, thanks. You just tell LaTeX what would be the optimal placement of your imported staff and it will try to do its best to make your happy. Why would I ever need LyX? Does it add new functionality to LaTeX? Not at all. It just looks cute.
Indeed. I want to get exactly what’s the best for the manuscript with minimum effort – PERIOD. My primary motivation in moving to LaTeX has been to cut down on unnecessary work and frustration, such as navigating through menus (I don’t care how intuitive) and making unnecessary petty decisions about formatting. It is one of the major advantages of LaTeX that it does all the formatting, placements, numbering, etc., for you and you can put 100% of the efforts to what you are writing. The word processors require me to do the formatting, while LaTeX does it faster and better than anyone doing it manually. Having access to visual formatting is like having access to drugs. While it may be helpful it is generally wasteful, harmful, dangerous, and basically causes more harm than good.
However, easy of reading/proofing and collaboration with those who don’t know LaTeX is a problem with LaTeX and LyX may be very helpful for it. Perhaps, that is the greatness opportunity for LyX. I have problems proofreading my own formulas with time if they are big enough. I just installed with great hopes LyX on my computers and was immediately in and out of love with it. Is the Emacs + AUCTEX with the visualizer available for Windows?
I was just wondering if Lyx is any different from DTP packages? First you write plain text with possible structural markup and then import it in layout software for typography and design. With Latex you don’t do your own styles, but is it otherwise any different?
Yes – but I’m thinking how to explain it.
Something like “publishing house style” (LyX) as opposed to “individual page layout” (DTP) – in LyX you set a “house style” and LyX just lays out your document in this for you, fairly simply, and does a lot of foornote/header/crossreference stuff for you – good for long manuscripts, books, treatises, technical stuff. In DTP you lay out the stuff yourself – good for visual stuff, ad and publicity, “adformation” type shorter stuff.
You pays your money (well – not in this case) and you takes your choice.
UTF8 out of the box is really needed. Until that happens I’ll stick with Alt+Shift and OpenOffice.org (really!)
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} works fine for me out of the box. Do you have a problem with this?
Edited 2006-05-22 16:42
Hmm, there should have been a backslash at the beginning of that comment – how does a guy get a literal backslash around here?
Edited: OK, I worked it out. It seems that double-backslash gets converted into single backslash in the initial post. On the other hand, when you edit a post, then you can use a single backslash.
Edited 2006-05-22 16:45