On 07/13/2011 10:48 AM, Torquil Macdonald Sørensen wrote: > On 13/07/11 16:38, Anders Host-Madsen wrote: >>> My ability to make documents look the way I want them to is limited. >> >> In my personal opinion, this is the weakness of LaTeX/LyX. >> LaTeX is great when you write for a medium >> with a defined formatting, e.g., a journal, and they give you a >> style file to use. Then you just fill out the >> contents. But if you a free to format your document, and have >> specific ideas on how it should look like, it's >> not that convenient. I found the easiest way is to use >> LaTeX packages such as enumitem, fancyhdr, and >> titlesec. Once you have formatted one document, you >> can use it as template for following documents. >> > > Not to imply that LyX is lacking in any way in this area (simply > because I don't know), but I know that LyX is at least great for > people like me, who are completely content to use a > basic/default/ordinary LaTeX formatting :-) I just use it in order to > have the power of LaTeX with less difficulty and better readability > while I write. > > So I'm glad that I can automatically get a great looking document > without having to do any "formatting work". > Let's put it this way: If you want every document you write to look different, then LaTeX is not your tool. But if you want to write (edit, publish) a lot of documents that look pretty much the same, then LaTeX is exactly your tool. Of course there are times for creative presentation, and there are other tools for that. But LyX (to return to it) is intended primarily for academic and technical writing, where content is the main thing and presentation is secondary, and most of us are perfectly happy to have a fairly small number of choices as far as presentation is concerned.
Word and its ilk have made people think they can do creative typesetting, when in fact what they tend to do is make a mess of things. I personally think it's a *good* thing that LyX does not make this easy. Richard
