Dear LyX team, I write to you as a user who wants to give some feedback on my last experience installing lyx1.5rc1 on windows from the bundle with all the dependencies.
First some background: I had already tried lyx some years ago, both under windows and linux, and have been trying it once in a while since then. As my knowledge of LaTeX and the complexity of my needs grew, I found myself feeling more comfortable writing «plain» LaTeX with a text editor rather than using lyx with lots of ERT. But recently my girlfriend complained to me for the 1000th time how awful and complicated it is for her to write her university papers with word, how it is a pain to make the table of contents, to work with styles, to write the bibliography list, to set crossreferences (which she still does manually), etc. Instantly, I thought of lyx. And so I decided to give the last version of lyx a try on her winXP machine (after helping her with her TOC, that is). I knew that since some versions ago there's now an officially supported windows port of lyx. I found the announcement of the fresh rc1 for lyx 1.5 on the website and went on to download the installer. I found 2 *.exe files: an installer without and another with all dependencies. Installing: I chose the bundle on purpose, as I knew the machine on which I wanted to install lyx isn't connected to the internet. I have to praise you for your work on the installer: it has and installs everything needed (miktex, ghostscript, imagemagick, etc.) in a mostly automated manner---very well thought out. (I still have to test the uninstallation, but if everything goes well and my girlfriend is comfortable with lyx, I won't have to ;-) After installing and upon running lyx for the first time, miktex tried to install some packages from the net. Imagine my surprise, as I thought everything I would ever need for running lyx should already be there. I have 2 quirks here: 1) some packages I needed weren't in the bundle, which I would rather recommend to include; 2) miktex wanted to install some extra packages which I can't imagine I will ever need nor can imagine that lyx needs them to run. Some clarifications: Upon installation I specified I wanted lyx localized in German. Then I chose aspell dictionaries for french, spanish, english and german. That's all I did that was out of the ordinary. Dictionaries: My suggestion here is as follows: I don't know how much space in MB all the dictionaries would take, but since the bundle weighs already 75+ MB, weren't it useful to pack them all in the bundle too? Even if the bundle grows up to 100 MB, for someone who wants to install it on a machine (or on many machines) without internet connection, spellchecking is such a basic feature that it makes the extra weight worthwhile. I can imagine that many lyx users aren't native language speakers of english, so packing all dictionaries in the bundle (~20?) should prove to be useful. MikTeX: From the files that MikTeX wanted to install (~15 if I recall correctly), I only recognized 1 which should be useful or needed for me: the koma script bundle. As I mentioned before, while installing I chose to localize lyx for German. I also chose during the MikTeX installation the default paper size to be DINA4. Because of this, miktex trying to install koma script is just natural. On the other hand, MikTeX tried to install some LaTeX style files and document classes to typeset articles submited for some specific english scientific journals, such as, e.g., amsart (if I recall correctly), and others. Why this is needed in order to just run lyx escapes my understanding. Last words: As I see it, lyx is becoming «the» tool for writing scientific papers without hassle and with all the power of LaTeX, and every student out there should at least know of it existence and have tried it once. I still have 1 personal quirk, though: On linux I prefer to work under gnome or xfce. I have until now succeeded on having a kde/qt-free desktop, so installing lyx would mean installing a lot of qt-libraries just for lyx to run. I know of the xforms-version, but if I understand correctly, future versions of lyx will be qt only, isn't it? Nevertheless, I will give it another try as soon as 1.5 is packaged for ubuntu. I wish you all a great 1.5 release! Regards Rafael
