Hi,
having watched a number of students at the university struggle with
latex, I think there are two big issues.
1. The mindset change - allowing the typesetting language (which is what
latex is) to layout the text to give nice documents
2. figure placement. If the document contains too many figures for the
quantity of text, all the figures go to the end of the document. - not
what is required.
The realisation that that computer will track all referencing, figure
numbering, added figures and just renumbers, table of contents
generation, - that is nice.
Having watched people use word,
it is kinda sad when they say they have lost everything because the
computer died and everything was in one big document and it was all bad..
watch someone work with word and manually go through the document and
change all the numbering cause the sections were moved. painful.
==============
There are a number of word haters out there, who used word 10 years ago.
and base their opinions on it back then. Word has improved a lot over
the years.
I am told that word's formatting and spacing is a lot better, equation
handling is better. Apparently, word has a latex processor which allows
it to read equations (pasted as latex)
and display them as intended. Which shows how good the underlying format
(latex) is.
However, latex is based on tex, which is a direct implementation of the
rules of correct typesetting. I like correct typesetting - it looks better.
Word is always going to be inferior to latex, as latex guarantees (100%)
that the text of the document is available. Always. (ignoring disk
crashes etc, but that is not the fault of latex).
Cheers,
Derek.
On 25/07/16 22:51, Helmut Walle wrote:
Hm, it's not quite as simple as that... LyX in the end just uses LaTeX
under the hood. While LyX allows you to get some output quicker than
starting with LaTeX itself, its functionality is limited in some
regards. In particular, if you need to use any LaTeX packages that are
not part of the standard LaTeX distribution, then you will still need
to know how to use them, because while you can use them in LyX it does
require that you are writing the input for them in literal LaTeX code
(which is supported by LyX all right), so that if you really want to
get decent mileage out of LyX you will still have to learn LaTeX.
To illustrate the point in terms of its practical relevance, let's say
you insert a table - LyX does that all right. Now the table gets a bit
longer and doesn't fit onto a single page in the PDF output anymore.
The standard LaTeX answer to this is to use the supertabular style.
But that is not a part of LyX. So you need to load it manually and
write the input manually... but if you can do that, then writing the
rest of the document in LaTeX should be easy.
But if you need to learn LaTeX anyway it will be a lot quicker and
easier copying the boilerplate stuff from some example, and then just
writing the rest of the input in your preferred text editor (the
obvious choice being EMACS, together with the auctex mode for LaTeX
language support).
Finally, LyX is not the only attempt to create a WYSIWYG editor around
LaTeX or TeX. I have had a look at a few of them in the past and have
forgotten their names - the real appeal of LaTeX is that usually it's
so good at layout that you don't have to worry about that aspect of
publishing very much, and you can focus on your content by using a
text editor. With appropriate language support that is also a lot
faster than having to move a mouse around in a clicky environment of
any kind.
Kind regards,
Helmut.
On 25/07/16 17:33, Christopher Sawtell wrote:
http://www.lyx.org
As far as I'm aware, this will do everything you mention.
( IMHO it's the answer to every [maiden] type-setter's dream. )
( You don't have to learn any TeX etc. gibberish )
On 25 July 2016 at 09:41, Jim Cheetham <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 5:00 PM, Ross Drummond
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>> wrote:
>>> I have an acquaintance who who maintains some reference
document in
>>> various forms. He produces identical documents in HTML PDF
and DOC
>>> formats.
Here's what my Asciidoc makefile does :
a2x -f text document.adoc
a2x -f pdf -k document.adoc --dblatex-opts="-P
doc.publisher.show=0 -P
latex.output.revhistory=0"
a2x -f xhtml document.adoc -a icons -a toc -a data-uri
I'm also using the same make process to generate different
versions of
diagrams using graphviz, mscgen and asciio + asciitosvg. See the
discussion on the ZeroMQ Guide to see another example of this
sort of
publishing chain
http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#Removing-Friction
-jim
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Sincerely,
Christopher Sawtell
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