It was a few months ago that I went through the hassle of import/exporting between LyX and SWP. Yes, SWP can export to "portable" latex, but it was not all that portable. However with a few tweaks it was possible to get a decent import into LyX. (I think there is a wiki page on it with regards to custom macros and images and I recall having a few other small issues).
The much harder problem was getting LyX documents into SWP. I can't remember exactly but SWP didn't like certain table formats. Any attempt to import the tex file would cause SWP to balloon in memory requirements and hog the CPU until it either crashed the machine or I killed the process. In the end the inflexible SWP won as the default application. But it is so hard to go from amazing-and-free LyX to cumbersome-buggy-and-expensive SWP. In fact, I would have much much rather just edited the raw text file than use SWP (but even that was a nightmare as SWP adds line breaks to its text file making 'diff' imposible to use). Again, I suppose my recommendation would be to make it as easy as possible to have users move from SWP to LyX (and it isnt that bad at the moment) but it probably isnt worth the time or energy to make LyX documents compatible with SWP. I honestly think that once one writes a single paper with LyX they will never go back SWP (but getting them to do that first paper is the hard bit). -Ken 2009/2/3 Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <lasgout...@lyx.org> > I have worked with a co-author that insists on using Scientific Word. My >> experience is that not only is SW/SWP very expensive, I also find it a far >> inferior product to LyX. It is not easy to import documents from SWP and >> even >> harder to export them to SWP even though they are both LaTeX editors. At >> the >> university, SWP is available as a standard install on machines but not >> LyX. >> > > Is it still true that swp is able to export 'portable latex' or whatever, > that > is easier to import? How does LyX fare with that? > > JMarc >
