On 8/17/13 12:13 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
Sat, 17 Aug 2013, Steve Litt of Troubleshooters.Com wrote:
I'm interested in knowing what users of LyX think of the idea of
using it as a general word processor, instead of MS Word, Libre
Office, Apple's Pages, etc.
Minuses: Much more difficult to create/change paragraph styles and
character styles than in MSWord or LibreOffice.
Ah! Not all of us want to tweak paragraphs, characters, or other aspects
of the page. :-)
I do approximately 97% of my writing with LyX, about 2.5% with emacs, and
the rest with LibreOffice Writer because I need to translate from M$ Word or
provide
something to a client or regulator in that format. Many years ago I decided
on the text and section head typefaces and the KOMA-Script flavors for
articles, reports, letters, and my book (which went to Springer as the
family of LaTeX files). I also use the beamer class for all presentation
visuals.
There are several benefits to using LyX (rather than LaTeX in emacs):
- I focus on the content because professional typographers determined the
page layout and other aspects of the document's physical appearance for me.
- It is much easier to move around since I use the same keyboard shortcuts
for LyX, emacs, joe, and other editing tasks that I learned with WordStar in
the early 1980s (and LO Writer drives me nuts because it does not do what I
expect and I won't waste the time to futz with it since I use it so little).
- The typeset document is subtly different from the line-formatted
processed word output. I suppose those of us who write with LaTeX/LyX
readily see the difference while those in the M$ world are not consciously
aware of the differences but they respond positively to them. It looks
professional, like a book or other typeset document and not like a processed
word document.
- Math equations, tables, and presentations are easier to prepare and look
much more professional than the output from alternatives.
There are many differences between the way a word processor formats text
and the way TeX formats text. The former is line-oriented (which is why you
see large spaces between words) while the latter is paragraph oriented. Few
word processed documents are hyphenated because it's not a default and the
overwhelming majority of M$ Word users I know never change a default ... any
default.
That's my $2's worth (inflation, you know).
Rich
How does it do at image placement, captions, etc.?
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.4
Firefox 23.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.04
