Well, there is no doubt that math typesetting and float tracking is considerably more robust in TeX, no need to argue about that. The main problem I am constantly encountering when I try to convert people in TeX is the fact that people get easily discouraged by the steep learning curve. And it *is* steep especially if you are coming from a text processing background.
My first experience with LyX was when I was trying to switch to TeX in general and it was disastrous. I got so frustrated I gave up. Nowadays, after having used (La)TeX for some years I found my second experience with LyX magical. Everything made sense and worked perfectly. The fact that LyX hides a lot of the horrid TeX markup is both good and bad. It's good because, well, it is more pleasing and eases the transition from word processing, but on the other hand when you start using a bazillion of packages and things break (and *will* break) it is quite difficult to dissect the errors, especially with the cryptic error messages that TeX produces. LyX is a really nice and mature piece of software and supports a great variety of widely used packages. No doubt the people behind it have worked hard to deliver such a nice product. But one should not expect that it magically transforms text into beautiful documents. In my opinion it is *complementary* to TeX and not a replacement. It will definitely get you started to produce documents easily, but if you want to go a step further then it will not write TeX for you; you will need to get your hands dirty. I've written my MSc thesis easily with LyX and it came out quite nice but my preamble was 300 lines long, so you get my point. Fortunately there is a huge amount of resources to help you with your endeavor. :) Spyros On Mon 17 Oct 2011 11:09:27 PM EEST, Les Denham wrote: > On Monday 17 October 2011 11:49:53 Johnston81 wrote: >> 1. Considering LyX over Word, how much time would I approximately need to >> learn LyX to the extent that I can actually produce text, including >> graphics and formulas(!), from a template? > > Assuming you are reasonably fast at learning new things (and I assume you are > as you are in graduate school): ten minutes. > >> 2. What can I reasonably expect my learning curve to be after having >> learned the bare basics; what I mean is, is it simple to teach LyX to >> oneself and how easy is it to solve problems when encountered? > > Most problems are quickly and easily solved. Some -- such as complying > exactly > with very specific formatting directions -- can be extraordinarily difficult. > >> 3. And finally, being a skilled user of Word would I - ultimately - save or >> spend time if I did try my luck on LyX? > > In spite of such a serious handicap I believe you will save a lot of time by > using LyX, as long as you forget all you know about Word. > > I recently sent to printing a 164 page book with figures (mainly photographs) > on nearly every page. I do not think it would be possible to generate a > satisfactory final PDF using Word, but it was relatively easy with LyX. > > Today I finished a 33-page report with 30 figures. My total time for > completing the report was about eight hours, of which 75% was spent > extracting > figures from PowerPoint presentations made by my collaborators and editing > them to look decent. >
