On Wednesday 05 July 2006 01:43 am, Alex wrote: > Dear all, > > One student who makes her diplom about "Comparing LyX to another Word > processors", asked me about the minimum HW required fo LyX.
Hi Alex, I think her initial question is unfair. Equally unfair would be "Comparing MS Word to other book rendering programs". MS Word isn't a book rendering program, and LyX isn't a word processor. In my personal opinion, one would have to have rocks in their head to use LyX for a 5 or 10 page document. In the time it takes to figure out how to change one style (Environment) in LyX, you could have completed the whole task in MS Word, WordPerfect or OpenOffice. On the other hand, writing a book in a word processor is problematic. Yes, I've done it, and still sell one written in WordPerfect 5 and one written in MS Word, but the typography isn't nearly as professional, getting chapter title pages to show up on odd pages is difficult and sometimes requires fine tuning, hyphenation is an aboration, and table of contents and indexing is neither easy nor good looking nor reliable. On my WP 5 book, any change in pagination requires a manual reworking of the table of contents. In LyX, once you have all your styles created (and that's a big "once"), it's absolutely trivial to produce a professional book, with the possible exception that you need to tag all the index words and phrases. By the way, what I did for indexing on "Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist" was to run the LyX file through a shellscript that split it into individual words and performed a unique sort. I came up with less than 1000 words. I then looked at every word, decided whether it, or a phrase including it, deserved a place in the index, weeding out all the extraneous words. Now armed with a list of words, within LyX I searched for all occurrences of each word and tagged them. If memory serves me, it took about 2 days to index this book of over 100,000 words, and the resulting index was complete and easy to use. HTH SteveT Steve Litt Author: * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist * Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting * Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore http://www.troubleshooters.com/utp/tcourses.htm
