Steve Litt wrote:
On Saturday 19 September 2009 11:07:54 Stefano Franchi wrote:
[...]
Given the original poster wanted to import, write and edit, I think he just
wanted an easier front end to the MSWord native format. That's definitely not
LyX.
MSWord's an excellent program, so why not just use that? I wouldn't want to
write a book or a 30 page report in MSWord, but for shorter stuff Word is just
fine.
Hi,
I'm going off-topic, but the last sentence made me jump so high that I
hit the ceiling ;-)
2 years ago, I was writing a report for a customer, which ended being 23
pages("Word is just fine" according to the above sentence). I had been
working for 2-3 days on it when Word (office 2003) crashed (that's
usual). This time, the result of the crash was: "back to day 1" (the
template, empty). Everything lost. No proposed recovery point. I
fortunately had a version saved on another disc a few hours before, so I
could recover most of my work, but not all. I let you imagine the level
of anger I developed that day (I've had similar experiences with Excel,
but that's another topic).
I would NEVER EVER advise the use of Word for more than 5 pages, if
images/graphs are embedded in the document. I have to use it for those
reports because that's the company procedure and the report needs to go
through other people (change-tracking) who only have Word. But for
internal documents, I immediately switched to LyX.
In addition to not losing my precious hours of work anymore, I benefited
from:
- nice pdf with hyperlinks/bookmarks (we use pdfcreator with office,
the links are no preserved with it),
- 2 to 3 times increase in speed when typing equations (MS equation
editor ... ouch!),
- nice looking documents,
- easy figure placement (frames in Word are not good, floats are better)
But to come back in-topic, I used plain text to transfer the content
from Word to LyX. I had to redo all pictures/figures, all styling, but
for a one-time process, it is acceptable.
Cheers,
Olivier
SteveT
Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
