On Thursday 29 May 2003 17:42, Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > DA>> of telling the editor "this is a big header" instead of telling > DA>> it "this is a 16pt. bold font"? They'd just see it as another > DA>> miracle tool... > > Yes, that's easy. Now suppose that editor's notion of "big header" differs > from yours - you want your big headers be bigger. Now, in word you can do > it in two ways - either change style (that's not hard) or change header > directly (this is much less effective, but yet easier). Now, from my > memories with LaTeX explaining it that big header should be bigger means > resorting to actual programming on some obscure language. Joe User would > rather pay $700 than have to do it even once.
I'm talking about lyx, not about writing directly in latex. No obscure language. LyX has a configuration dialog where you can specify the size in points of the fonts you use. True, it doesn't include support for more advanced customization of the styles (bold/emphasized/underlined, alignment and numbering logic...). This can only be done atm via lyx's (quite intuitive) plaintext configuration files. It ought to be fairly easy to add this capability to lyx's GUI, if that's the real obstacle to adoption. > > DA>> Well, so tell latex about the styles and arrangement of a fax or > DA>> recipe or whatever. There must be latex document classes for > DA>> many things out there... > > So, do you remember how to make fax out of latex? Like, just now? > Can you explain it to me in one sentence? No, I can't. I've never written or read a single line of latex code. The whole point of lyx's existence is to let people harness the power of latex without knowing its syntax, using an intuitive and powerful GUI instead. To create or substiantially modify a document class (eg create one for faxes), yes you need to know about latex. The point is, Joe User will never need to do it. (He couldn't create a new high-quality template for msword, either, he just used the ones already there.) LyX already comes with some good classes, more can be added for common tasks (fax, etc.). And institutions accepting documents or forms of any kind can make a class to use when submitting work to them and publish it. If they don't do it, the community probably will, provided enough people use lyx. The amount of effort that needs to go into writing and maintaing these classes is so much smaller than the effort it took to write lyx (and latex :-). We're most of the way there already. -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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