On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 10:10:59AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote: > On Wednesday 05 July 2006 01:43 am, Alex wrote: > > Dear all, > > > > One student who makes her diplom about "Comparing LyX to another Word > > processors", asked me about the minimum HW required fo LyX. > > I think her initial question is unfair. Equally unfair would be "Comparing MS > Word to other book rendering programs". MS Word isn't a book rendering > program, and LyX isn't a word processor. > In what way isn't LyX a word processor? The way I see it, LyX is both a word processor and much more.
> In my personal opinion, one would have to have rocks in their head to use LyX > for a 5 or 10 page document. In the time it takes to figure out how to change > one style (Environment) in LyX, you could have completed the whole task in MS > Word, WordPerfect or OpenOffice. > I use LyX for all writing, including short letters and half-page documents. This is not a problem. Of course I don't create custom environments for such short documents, but then I have no need for that either. Most of what I write is done with a few headings, standard paragraphs and perhaps a bulleted list or two. I have a custom setup for A4 letters, created once and used hundreds of times. Sometimes I use LyX for writing down the minutes of meetings, having an instant pdf ready when the meeting ends. When something can't be done in LyX, I resort to gimp instead. ;-) > On the other hand, writing a book in a word processor is problematic. Yes, > I've done it, and still sell one written in WordPerfect 5 and one written in > MS Word, but the typography isn't nearly as professional, getting chapter > title pages to show up on odd pages is difficult and sometimes requires fine > tuning, hyphenation is an aboration, and table of contents and indexing is > neither easy nor good looking nor reliable. On my WP 5 book, any change in > pagination requires a manual reworking of the table of contents. > Ouch! > In LyX, once you have all your styles created (and that's a big "once"), it's It is a big once indeed, which is ok for a book. For small stuff, the existing document classes does the job for me most of the time. > absolutely trivial to produce a professional book, with the possible > exception that you need to tag all the index words and phrases. > > By the way, what I did for indexing on "Troubleshooting Techniques of the > Successful Technologist" was to run the LyX file through a shellscript that > split it into individual words and performed a unique sort. I came up with > less than 1000 words. I then looked at every word, decided whether it, or a > phrase including it, deserved a place in the index, weeding out all the > extraneous words. Now armed with a list of words, within LyX I searched for > all occurrences of each word and tagged them. If memory serves me, it took > about 2 days to index this book of over 100,000 words, and the resulting > index was complete and easy to use. > Interesting approach. For further automation, consider: Look at how indexed words are represented in the .lyx file. Then, use a text editor like emacs (or even a sed script) and auto-index every word with a global search & replace operation. This way, you won't have to perform actions for every occurence of some word. Of course this approach is appropriate only if _every_ occurence of the word must be indexed. Often only the important occurences deserve to be indexed. Helge Hafting
