> Just the same as I do on the LyX list, I brought up the fact that if you want > to, you can do styles based authoring on MS Word just as easily as on TeX or > LaTeX or LyX, and in fact I've written a complete book in WordPerfect 5.1 and > another in MS Word, using nothing but styles. And of course a debate > ensued :-)
I've been using "structure markup" as The Natural Way to work with documents for 20 years, the first time with Wordperfect on DOS 3.3, long before I even heard of the existence of LaTeX or SGML. > But then one guy brought up an irrefutable point which I think might be an > outstanding talking point of LyX. He said that wordprocessing documents often > get so messed up, format wise, that they can't be salvaged without saving to > text and reformatting everything. I've certainly seen such a MS Word doc -- I > think we all have. In fact in collaborative environments (e.g. companies), where several people work together on the same document, Word documents _always_ end up like that - A hopelessly tangled spaghetti mess. In fact I never managed to figure out how to copy and paste content from two different versions of a document, which are both perfectly well "styled" and which were created using the same "template" in such a way that the resulting document isn't messed up. Other document processors (Framemaker, Wordperfect, RagTime, Nisus, Mellel...) show how to implement this a _lot_ better. Interestingly, OpenOffice is the only one I know of that does as badly as MS Word. With Wordperfect, there's "Reveal Codes", which allows you to see what's wrong and fix it. With SGML/XML environments, you can show the "tags" and edit them directly. > With TeX or LaTeX or LyX, almost always coding errors immediately make the > doc > uncompileable, so you see it right away. The one exception is when a document > class silently reverts to the default, and I showed how to prevent that here: > > http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/lyx/surefire_layout.htm > > So I think one LyX talking point to add is that with LyX, you seldom get docs > that format themselves into uselessness. You can mess up a document with "finger-painting" in LaTeX/LyX as well, however. And those im-/export filters that I know of do so. Sincerely, Wolfgang
