suitability

[Richard O'Regan]

The Lyx Team:

I do a lot of editing and typesetting of English language books, mostly 
all having a lot of text and sometimes hundreds of footnotes. I use Mac 
OSX and either Word, FrameMaker or Indesign (the latter is there are 
only one or two footnotes). Most of the documents I receive from other 
sources for editing are Windows Word documents.

Years ago I experimented with TeX but found it too difficult and not 
entirely practical if one is not actually writing, but is removing 
wrongly-formatted texts and re-formatting them. I know that Tex 
produced much better looking documents than Word, FrameMaker, Indesign, 
but to me it appeared more designed for the writing writer, rather than 
for an editor working with already prepared documents.

I am wondering if Lyx today -- working on a Panther-equipped Mac -- 
might be more practical than the programs I have mentioned.
If so, where can I get some clear one-two-three explanations of how a 
complete beginner would go about installing and using Lyx? I find that 
most of the information available on your site is too technical to 
understand.

Thank you for any information you can offer.

Richard O'Regan, Geneva