Hello, I was advised on the tex newsgroup to post this here. Just a bit of background: I've done a graduate thesis, presentations, and conference papers in LaTex, but that was many years ago. I am highly, highly troubled by Word. I'm a fan of Framemaker 1st, and WordPerfect 2nd. However, the only tools accessible right now are Word and LaTex. I've installed LaTex and Lyx via the Cygwin installation, made LaTex work with the templates that we have to use, and dabbled with Lyx. I can view and export PDFs of little "Hello world" test files.
I'm reading the online documentation, and see no navigation panel to navigate the chapters and subsections. There is only the "Table of Contents" (TOC) button, which only shows 1st level headings. So I tried to view the online docs as PDFs in hopes of seeing the full TOC, maybe even hyperlinked if I'm lucky. However, this always seems to crash Lyx. From the task manager, I can see all sorts of processes rising to the top of my list, sorted by CPU usage. So no one process is stalled, but there might be a script caught in a loop. Same thing happens if I restart Lyx and try to export to PDF. If I try to print to a PS file the PS file never shows up (looked in the default directory, as well as the directory I specified). I am able to print my HelloWorld file to PS, though. Are the online documents unprintable/unexportable in other Lyx installations? Since my aim is to replace Word, there is some functionality I'm hoping to see present. One is Word's "outline mode", which lets the user collapse or expand any hierarcy of text, promote/demote move entire subtrees of text, and generally move subtrees around. Is there such functionality in Lyx? I'm also interested in hyperlinking, both in the Lyx file and the final PDF file. I know I can generate hyperlinks in LaTeX, but only in the final PDF (since LaTeX is just text). Even that needs all sorts of files and commands embedded in the LaTeX file. I understand that the user has to make them known to Lyx. I'm not necessarily expecting someone to spell out step by step how to do it (though I wouldn't ignore it if someone did), I'd appreciate it if those who have tried going through the process can indicate how straightforward it is, assuming it is even possible. On the matter of making files known to Lyx, the template I'm using is for LaTeX use. How painless is it to make it available to Lyx? I'm thinking that as I navigate the online docs, there might be a section that says how to point Lyx to the tetex tree that I set up for LaTex (I'm a bit new to that, too, and it took about 1.5 days to get the template working, including fetching missing files from the web). Thanks for an advance idea of what can be expected. Finally, a question to those who had experience in LaTeX before going to Lyx -- was it worthwhile? Did you find it actually helped? Fred
