Steve Litt wrote:
On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
Jeremy Wells wrote:
For some time I have been evaluating Lyx as an academic word
processor, but find it wanting in a few critical areas.
For instance, the stated goal of Lyx is to spend more time writing,
but less time on formatting. Based on my experience, however, and from
posts to this list, a great deal of time is spent inserting LaTeX tags
into documents.
It certainly seems like that, when reading this list. For inserting latex
tags is the one operation that people really need help with.
The many people who just write and don't use latex tags, don't post much
questions either.
I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.
In fact, my assessment is that more time is spent making Lyx work
properly than is spent in dealing with a traditional word-processing
environment, be it MS Word or OpenOffice. Moreover, a significant time
investment is required to research the format of the tag and where to
insert it, and then to debug the results. How does this save time?
You write lots of documents, all with different and very specific layout
needs?
Then you might need a writing tool more oriented towards layout tweaking.
Lyx may not be the tool if every new document needs a radically different
layout.
That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that
significant
Sure, a book is big enough that you can justify spending quite some
time perfecting a custom layout. After a while you get good at
it too, so it don't take so much time. A good thing with lyx is
that once you have perfected the layout, you can write another
chapter without any more tweaking. :-)
I can only guess that Jeremy writes shorter documents than your books,
all with different styles, seeing how he complains that layout tweaking
takes more time with lyx than other word processors.
Helge Hafting
