On Tuesday 11 October 2005 11:42, Nick Rout wrote: > On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:28:39 +1300 > > Michael JasonSmith wrote: > > On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 10:44 +1300, Carl Cerecke wrote: > > > On 11/10/05, Douglas Royds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > However, this is a wake-up call for the Open Source community. Name > > > > the tools that I can use to separately edit style and content. Nvu? I > > > > do use it (a little) but man, is it flakey. Mostly I manually edit my > > > > style sheets and xhtml directly, and no, a plain text editor may > > > > satisfy geeks (I use the centre of evil, after all), but it'll never > > > > satisfy a mere mortal. > > > > > > LaTeX > > > > OpenOffice.org: press F11 and relax. > > Word. Use styles. ditto. > > Honestly word has had styles as long as I can remember. Its just that no > one uses them, just like no one uses them in openoffice unless they are > forced to. Most people think of a word processor as a typewriter with > easier white out. > > The advantage of lyx/latex is that styles are forced on you. The > disadvantage is the under support for anything other than what geeks > want to type (computer documentation, learned articles, text books). > latex/lyx is not sexy, so very little effort has gone into producing and > packaging a set of templates for business. I do not want to write books > or articles, I want business letters and boilerplate scriptable legal > documents. Just go for it then and please stop burbling total FUD. I agree that there are no document classes specifically for NZ Legal practice, so you would have to create them for your self, or commision somebody to do it for you. However please note that Lyx currently offers 20 builtin document styles, and in addition you can use any existing LaTeX style with little difficulty.
Non-geek styles offered by LyX include:- Dinbrief Letters written according to German standards. Letter Letter writing for English language writer. Hollywood and Broadway. Fairly obviously for writing film scripts and theatrical plays. Memoir. Also for Poetry, and all types of Literature - Fiction and non-Fiction. Dinbrief or Letter ( or its Koma variant ) would I'm sure be fine for you write you business letters. Alternatively it would not be beyond your capabilities to modify one of these to suit your needs. emerge lyx and run it. Select Help -> Extended Features -> Section 4 for the extensive documentation about the built-in document classes. I have installed LyX on my ThinkPad which you can see this evening should you so wish. -- CS
