-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I don't know what this means. I write a paragraph in OO, in Lyx, and in Abiword. Same paragraph. I then print it. It looks identical regardless of what I used to generate it. The text is whatever quality the printer can produce. There is nothing magic about latex/lyx output to printer.
Text is text is text. Times New Roman is Times New Roman no matter what wordprocessor is used. Arial is arial is arial. A printer can only produce what it is designed for and no better. In what way can Latex/Lyx somehow make a printer work better than any other app/tool? There is no difference in text quality and formatting between Lyx and Kwrite for that matter. As the subject has OT in it, I wont worry about the OT nature of this but... Writing my dissertation I had a couple very strict options with how to deal with figures. I could produce all my figures and legends and add them all to the end of the document or I could include them within the body by either providing them their own individual pages immediately after the first page from which the figure was first referred to. In something like Word, wordperfect, OO, Abiword, etc, I KNOW where page breaks are and will be. What you see is exactly what you get. The first word on any page is what it is on the screen. The last word on a page is the same last word seen on the screen. In lyx there is no indication of where page breaks will be. You don't know until you either print it or do a preview (which is the same as printing it, time-wise, but just stops one step prior to actually sending to printer). This is HELL when you are trying to add graphics the page after the first reference in the text. All you can do is do a preview, look at the page where the figure is referenced, see which paragraph ends the page, and perhaps where in a paragraph the page ends. You then insert a special character (a page break) in the screen view at the APPARENT correct location in the text onscreen. Silly you, you thought this would work. It SEEMS reasonable. It doesn't work. What you get is the graphic does appear on its own page and it occurs after the word you wanted but you find that by entering a page break at that location, you altered the formatting of the paragraph. You were using right justification but now the word that was at the end of the page originally is no longer right justified as it was. There is room there now for another word, or perhaps a part of a hyphenated word. To get the end of the page and paragraph to be properly right justified you either have to experiment with hyphenated variants of the next word in the sentence OR you have to start experimenting with entering protected blanks (you have to do a LOT of this) to finally get the final output text to be properly formatted. The problem exists for inline graphics too. Say you use inline graphics in your text, but to do so you have to have at least 1/2 the text below the graphic. You have to do preview after preview, tweaking the position of the graphic again and again until it is placed just right on the final output. There is no indication onscreen that you are doing OK. Many words are not properly hyphenated in lyx. All too often you have set your right margin to be just right. For my dissertation it was a hard, fast 1 inch. No less. No more. I generate the document and it looks OK, but I goofed and didn't go over every single page with my careful eye. It turns out that on several pages scattered throughout the document, lyx and latex screwed up and didn't hyphenate a long word...and let it blow right through your hard, fast 1 inch margins. You have to manually go in after the fact and instruct lyx/latex how to hyphenate those words. And DNA sequences? In every case, unless you provide a cryptic latex command in the document preamble, Lyx/latex will blow the sequence well past your margin. You NEVER run into these problems in a normal WYSIWYG wordprocessor. Never. Because what you see on the screen is exactly what comes out of the printer. No suprises. Lyx is powerful. If you know programming languages, and latex happens to be one of them, then Latex/Lyx is fine. You will be able to add cryptic commands to the preamble and in the document (insert latex) without problem. But UGH! I use it because I HAVE to use it (thus far). The instant an alternative comes along, like OO with proper bibliography handling capabilities, I will drop lyx and latex like a ball of plutonium. praedor On Sunday 09 November 2003 07:18 pm, T. Ribbrock wrote: > On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 06:36:23PM -0500, Praedor Atrebates wrote: > Content-Description: clearsigned data > [...] > > > There is NOTHING like Word/Wordperfect + EndNote in linux - Lyx > > contains it all in one package but you give up WYSIWYG and the ease that > > comes with that. > > Well, on the other hand: Word is *nowhere* near in matching the > print-out quality of LaTeX - and neither is OOo. Does Wordperfect > match it? > So far, the only WYSIWYG program able to match LaTeX for > sheer quality of print-out (that I have seen) was Framemaker, and > that's an entirely different league (pricewise, for starters...). > > Also, you don't need to know much to write a good LaTeX document - > that's the beauty of it. LaTeX takes care of most things and you > concentrate on typing as opposed to doing layout. That's how I did it > with my scripture and reports - all written in LaTeX (XEmacs > rules...). Word would have forced me to put a lot more effort in > layout (still does) - and I hate it for that. Never mind about the old > "change your printer - reformat your document" problem... > > Cheerio, > > Thomas - -- Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. - --Krakauer -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/ruJab1CLurEA6xURApgkAKCNzN2xJkqwMxY7/nUm6GxDr2/1kQCg2Gi4 8e/QgyK/JpiDgi3c/NapC60= =4sg5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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