On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 02:30:14AM +0200, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
> This opens up a question: if you leave alone the fact that lyx is
> free.. and that the underlying latex is supposely bug free. why
> features does lyx offer that word doesnt? (the contrary isnt really to
> be asked :) ) . I mean.. all the manual is boasting about has
> (internal references, footnotes etc etc.. ) are all things that have
> existed for at least 5 years in Word, and the equation editor its the
> same (if not plain better) than the one offered in Lyx.
"existing" isn't the same as "works well" or "plays well with others".
(Warning: Tale of Woe follows)
I wish I could use Lyx at work. Unfortunately the manual for the
software I work on is required (by the client) to be in Word-readable
format. We use RTF format on the theory that (a) we could use the same
source document for the official copy, (b) to convert to HTML for the
on-line version of the manual which we are planning to give them, and
(c) we could use StarOffice to edit it as well as MS Word (because we
are a mainly Unix (Solaris) place, so MS Windows is not on every
desk, but Solaris is).
Unfortunately, (c) was not to be, because (b) entailed doing something
which is apparently non-standard (even though it is perfectly legal RTF
according to the RTF spec). What was this non-standard thing?
Instead of having all the pictures (for example, lots of screen dumps;
this is a software manual after all) embedded inside the document in
Windows MetaFile format (which is the default) we wanted the images to
be in PNG format, and *linked* to the document. That way we could
use the same image files for both the normal and the HTML version of the
document. Sound reasonable?
(Yes, there are WMF to GIF/PNG converters out there which run on Unix.
Tried them. Didn't work on all our images. Forget it.)
I cannot tell you the amount of trouble I had with this, just trying to
get MS Word to actually display the darned pictures in the right spot
without vanishing (or magically turning into WMF format anyway).
StarOffice simply won't play ball with these pictures at all -- they get
moved to wierd spots on the page, and if you save the file... I can't
remember what happened when you saved the file, but it messed things up
in some way.
If I'd been using Lyx, none of these problems would have happened. I'd
just use "convert" to generate EPS files from the PNG files, the
Postscript would have used the EPS files, the HTML would have used the
PNG files, and Lyx would have figured out where to put all the pictures,
without making them vanish or go half off the page and have me trying to
move them around carefully with a mouse, and putting in needless spaces
to try to make them come out right...
Then, take the table of contents. Yes, MS Word will generate a table of
contents for you -- but only semi-automatically. This manual of which I
speak isn't small -- nine chapters and at least three appendixes.
Naturally, we have this broken into separate files, one for each chapter
and appendix, and use a Master Document to bring it all together.
(I will not tell you the trouble I had trying to find out how to insert
a new chapter in the middle of the existing ones -- at one point I was
considering making a whole new master document...). After I inserted
the new chapter, I had to re-generate the table of contents, which
required loading the master document, loading all the sub-documents into
memory, and then go and tell it to generate a table of contents. It
took forever.
How does that compare with just inserting a Table of Contents marker in
Lyx, once, and have it *always* make a new table of contents when you
generate the whole document?
Yes, MS Word has Styles, but they're an afterthought. You don't have to
use them, you don't have to use them consistently, and someone can come
along and mess them up. I *like* logical formatting, it's clean, it's
consistent, it's easy to change when you need to.
So, no, it isn't that MS Word doesn't *have* these things... it just
doesn't have them well. (Not to mention the risk of macro viruses...)
But it seems, that for you, LyX doesn't do tables well. I can't speak
to that, because I haven't needed to use tables much with my LyX stuff.
Likewise, I'm not typing in equations either.
One thing that LyX definitely does worse is fonts -- but that's because
of the limitations of TeX. Does anyone know if that's ever likely to
improve?
Kathryn Andersen
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Cally: No joyous multitude?
Vila: No joyous anybody. I've seen more life in a prison blanket.
(Blake's 7: Death Watch [C12])
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