>Thanks to all who responded to my requests for help to get LyX >working. It's now functioning fine... but tex2lyx has problems >translating my sample file so... > >Having looked at Latex stuff a lot over the past few weeks as a Latex >newbie, could I ask a (heretical!?) question? Why isn't LyX (or >something else) a fully fledged WYSIWYG word processor? I can see the >logic in how Donald Knuth designed things originally but I suspect a >lot of that was guided by the fact that computers then were not >capable of doing page rendering on the fly. But I don't think that >restriction is true anymore. So is there any fundamental reason why >Yap, say, couldn't be turned into a word processor... other then the >obvious one of the effort involved? Just wondering because Latex is a >significant learning curve and the tools are really rather >rudimentary. WYSIWYG DTP programs exist! > >Peter >
Hello, I think most of all concur in saying that the WYSIWYM approach has the advantage of drawing clearly the line between thinking and writing, on one side, and typesetting on the other. IMO, there are two main problems with any WYSIWYG system: first, and most important, is precisely that it ties the two tasks (writing and designing) so tightly, that you end up designing your document as you type it, and thinking that threading together form and content is not just a Good Thing, but the True Way (perhaps the Only Way); second, and no less trivial, is that the programs implementing any WYSIWYG system have to incorporate, in one go, the complicated algorithms making good typography, plus the complicated algorithms making good spell checking and hyphenation, plus the complicated algorithms making good font rendering, including hinting, for both printing and screen display, among many other things. In the end, you get pretty bloated programs eating up your hard drive, RAM memory, CPU time, and personal budget, while tying your hands to what you get on screen, hoping nothing will go wrong in the way to the printer... if you add that most WYSIWYG systems in the market have their own secret/undocumented formats, you might be end up buying potential disasters. In my last experience with the most (in)famous of them, the thing ended up eating all the footnotes of my Dissertation draft. You may guess the feeling... I like TeX for its output; I like LaTeX for its simpler structured document format, centered in content rather than format; and I like LyX for hiding most of the quirks of LaTeX's syntax from me with a simple GUI. It is a Good Thing that LyX only understands a subset of LaTeX, since it is easier to implement than the whole of TeX's language (I think both TeXmacs and microIMP go wrong in trying to implement TeX's guts right on the GUI, but I might be biased), and for any extra requirement there is always room for some ERT; it is a Good Thing that LyX is not committed to use TeX's fonts on screen, and relies instead on the OS's native capabilities; and it is a Good Thing that the background typesetting engine is TeX, which is powerful, reliable, and free. So, in my view, LyX fills exactly the gap between good typesetting and easy typing. Having said that, I think there are two things that keep most people from trying something like LyX (or any other WYSIWYM system). First, some people really want to design leaflets, postcards, greeting cards, magazines, or what not... and they mean to find something exactly like "point and click" to do this job for them. What they need is a CAD program, not a word processor, and LyX was not made for them. Second, so many people are fed with the FUD spread by some vendors or IT people, that the very thought of trying something else than M$W*rd or their alikes makes them tremble. Some of my colleagues get very interested from what they see I can do with LyX/TeX (Greek, Math, Polish and Arabic in one document, typed in plain ascii), but when they hear I do not use W*rd, they get very anxious about being isolated from "the rest of the world", and give up without trying. I might be wrong on this, but it seems to me that what we might be missing here two things to promote the spreading of LyX and/or WYSIWYM. First, the development of some clean interface between WYSIWYG designing and WYSIWYM typing, perhaps something like a clean filter back and forth between LyX and RTF/XHTML, so that those poor souls tied to traditional word processors may not feel isolated from "the rest of the world"; and second, perhaps giving LyX the ability to do this filtering and other automated tasks by itself, perhaps with some built-in scripting language (elisp from emacs, or python from OpenOffice, come to mind). This way LyX wouldn't rely on external programs, like perl or python today... Right now I'm comfy with them, plus gema and gpp, to do this stuff myself. But *sigh* it would be sooo great... Cheers, Luis. =========================== I don't have a copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. I have no plans to buy one. Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use proprietary data formats, encouraging consumerism by forcing us to purchase new licenses every time they "upgrade" their secret formats. Send plain text, rich text format, html, or pdf instead. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html J.L.Rivera ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
