>>From: Robin Turner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>Subject: Re: Introduction in User Guide
>>Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 16:31:11 +0300
>>
>>On Thursday 03 May 2001 08:04, Matej Cepl wrote:
>>[snip]
>>> I certainly know, that most of the users of _other_ wordprocessors
>>> doesn't know about anything about styles, headlines numbering, etc.
>>> However, it is certainly not the fault of these wordprocessors (well,
>>> sort of, but not that these programs were not able to do it). It seems
>>> to me, that author of User Guide made WYSIWYG wordprocessors even more
>>> dull than they are. If you ever "changed all of the section numbers
>>> because you deleted an old section" in these wordprocessors, than you
>>> certainly never read any manual to them (OK, unless you had M$ Works,
>>> but it is certainly not the program we want to be measured with, isn't
>>> it?). And so on.
>>
>>To quote from my own LyX guide:
>>
>>"To be fair to Word and other wordprocessors, there are things you can do to
>>set up predefined styles, numbering etc.. I did this when I was writing my MA
>>dissertation; unfortunately it took longer to get it working properly than it
>>would have done to have typed everything manually, and when I came back from
>>holiday, somebody had deleted all my custom styles."
>>
>>Conventional word processors can do just about anything you can do in LyX,
>>and even qute a few things you can't do in LyX. The important point is that
>>what LyX does, it does easily and well.
>>
>>Robin
A really big problem with a conventional word processor
is that when you are facing the screen
with the window open, you are unable to know if it is a complete
WYSIWYG sculpture of the document or if the author has made en extensive use
of styles, symbolic references, etc.
And if you don't know, a conversion program will hardly know either...
Just have a look at HTML export and, worse, at HTML import (where there
*should* be some style formatting).
The point with LaTeX/LyX is that somebody somewhere should hack the styles
for you, so you just have to know about your own scientific, juridic
or any kind of significant stuff and don't mind other guys business:
these other guys perform in fact a typographic job, and their life is simpler
through the automation of the tedious part thanks to
Donald E. Knuth and all people who made easy access to it.
The main point of TeX is that typography (in the sense of page layout
construction and reference manipulation) requires *compilation*
of the document in the original sense of the word. Then separation
of data (what you mean) and compilation parameters (what presentation
you want) is compulsory and extends far away the presentation
or screen and printing on various printers: hypertextual
exports can use the structuration and symbolic reference
information already present for typographic reasons.
This was already true since TeX/LaTeX, but LyX is the last
avatar which allows a fair comparison of similar UIs between the
two ways to do it.
--
Jean-Pierre
