Martin A. Hansen wrote:
> can someone supply screenshots showing the differences of a given layout
> in word and in lyx. i think it would be very nice to draw peoples
> attention to small examples where the typesetting differences are
> clear:
>
> 1. line-based vs paragraph-based layout
>
> 2. floats
>
> 3. orphans

I tried to create an example with LyX and Word, both showing a layout that has 
been tweaked quite a bit, using the same font (Palatino) and also mostly the 
same settings. I tried to make the Word thing as good as possible, otherwise 
the comparision would not be fair.

http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/Examples/example-lyx.pdf
http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/Examples/example-word.pdf

IMO, although the word document might be considered "o.k." at first sight, 
that the LyX variant looks better. Why? The page "harmony" is better (due to 
LaTeX page breaking algorithm), the interword spacing is better in general, 
page breaking is more intelligent (two orphans in the word file), pdflatex's 
"font expansion" feature is being used (i.e., the fonts are being 
expanded/decreased insignificantly in some line to get a better line 
breaking), and finally: character protuding, i.e., the lines with hyphenation 
dashes are slightly shifted toward the margin, thus giving the impression of 
a more "harmonic" margin; actually, LyX did less hyphenations, which might be 
a result of the paragraph based line breaking algorithm. Then, LyX is doing a 
better job with different spacings (we have a thin space at "e.g.", normal 
interword spacing, and a larger space after punctuations (actually, this is 
also possible with word, but it is seldomly used). And so on.

Note also that the effort to produce such a layout in Word has been 
significantly higher than in LyX. And I think the real hassle begins when the 
document has >100 pages.

J�rgen

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