I have been using Lyx for about five days and am up and running okay.
I am trying to produce a long manuscript that incorporates many, many marginal notes, many of them very long (i.e., more than a page). Right now I'm using Word and its text boxes to do this, and it's a pain in the neck.
Here is what I would like to do with Lyx
1) have marginal notes that extend across page breaks
not possible with LaTeX, you can try the parallel.sty package.
Herbert
