I know Scientific workplace from my MS thesis: It's
reasonably well, but sometimes you need to tweak the
Latex code anyway. For some reason you should be
extremely careful doing that, because it tried to eat
my document a couple of times when I was trying to
write the abstract and bibliography. Thanks God I had
multiple backups :). It sometimes does not cooperate
well with other editors, and I guess that's the reason
for incompatibility. You're right in that, it's not
very reliable for sharing documents (at least I feel
so).
This is true even when you save the file as portable
LaTeX and avoid all those TCI macros. Anyway, it's in
fact a good piece of software, but if someone requests
hundreds of dollars for something, they should be
ready for all kinds of moaning and whining (like mine
:)). And to be fair I used it a couple of years ago,
so probably newer versions may be more robust.
I don't know if you mean that, but I tried to set up
emacs and auctex with preview mode but for some reason
emacs keeps freezing and crushing on my machine: I'm
not a big fan of it anyways:). Therefore I couldn't
get to the preview mode at all:). Searching for a
solution, I've seen an article on the web which
mentioned LyX in just one line (it was about Vim vs.
Emacs; namely something alien for a Windows user like
me:)
LyX fares well as the time being though, and I'm
fairly impressed.
Nusret
--- "Paul A. Rubin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Nusret BALCI wrote:
>
> >Alright, not a big deal. I was struggling with
> LaTeX
> >front ends: Winedt seems to be best among them, but
> >even that is not much more than a text editor, say
> >Scintilla.
> >
> Right, AFAIK Winedt does nothing to insulate you
> from LaTeX.
>
> > LyX may be a real savior if it is as good
> >as my first impression--we'll see :)
> >
> It is.
>
> > (Literally: it
> >may save me a couple of hundreds of bucks: I was
> about
> >to buy Scientific Workplace :).
> >
> >
> I was on the cusp of that myself before I came
> across LyX. There are a
> couple of other open-source projects out there doing
> front-ends to
> LaTeX, including at least one or two that try to
> render the document on
> the fly (WYSIWYG). I tried one, and it's pretty
> slow. LyX does not
> completely eliminate a need for LaTeX, but it
> handles 80-90% of the job,
> and you can stick in raw LaTeX where needed. I
> think you're going to
> like it, and the price is certainly attractive.
>
> I did a co-authored paper with a Scientific
> Workplace user. Turns out
> SW lards up the LaTeX file with custom (SW-specific)
> styles and/or
> commands. Not a problem if two SW users are
> swapping a document back
> and forth, but I imagine that trying to send the
> exported LaTeX file to
> a publisher might be an adventure.
>
> >Thank you for help, paul: i appreciate it.
> >
> >
> You're welcome.
>
> Paul
>
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