I'm a Latex user who has, as the wending ways of the world sometimes induce, stumbled over an advertisement for LyX.
Am I right in imagining LyX as being rather like one of those HTML editors that have a toggle between source code and a graphical representation, so that one can happily type away in a graphical window until one comes to a command sequence that is sufficiently unusual not to have a button on the editor, one flips a button and the screen changes to what the source code actually looks like underneath, one enters the desired <HTMLcommand> </HTMLcommand> or edits the source code if it's misbehaving, and switches back to the graphical interface, all complexity having been conquered at it's own level?
Not exactly. LyX behaves more like a WYSIWYG HTML editor. When using a WYSIWYG HTML editor, one works with an approximation of what the page will look like in a browser, and typically there's an easy command to pass the page to your browser of choice to see the final product. With LyX, the equivalent process is to view the final product either in a DVI viewer or, if your goal is to end up with a PDF file, in a PDF reader.
There is not, however, an option to burrow down to the underlying "source code". LyX source files are text files, but they are *very* verbose, and to the best of my knowledge one almost nevers wants to (or needs to) edit them directly. The one exception to that is that I've seen people occasionally resort to grepping the source file to change all instances of some format to some other format (I think ... never tried it myself).
You can insert raw LaTeX into a LyX file via the LyX GUI, in much the same way that a WYSIWYG HTML editor will typically let you embed Javascript or unusual HTML tags without having to leave the editor.
Hope that helps,
-- Paul
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Paul A. Rubin Phone: (517) 432-3509
Department of Management Fax: (517) 432-1111
The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Michigan State University http://www.msu.edu/~rubin/
East Lansing, MI 48824-1122 (USA)
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Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whenever you say something to them,
they translate it into their own language, and at once it is something
entirely different. J. W. v. GOETHE
