On 10/23/13 2:31 PM, Richard Talley wrote:
Interesting comments. I too have found small vendors to be much more helpful. Often the developers help with or even do all of the tech support at small vendors. And they actually read my emails, instead of replying with canned responses.
Most of the time, you can't get help from the big guys, really pisses me off.
My experience with LyX has been mostly excellent. I started using it at work a number of years ago because I need to produce some technical manuals quickly. I wanted something that would not lose track of things in the cross-references and TOC (as Word is wont to do as documents get longer and more complex). LyX allowed me to get to work right away on content and produced very professional output.
I'm hoping my experience parallels yours. And you are right about Word, at least the XP and 2003 versions. The bigger the project, the bigger the piece of crap it turned out to be. The time is long gone when I could afford to buy programs to find one that worked, and I had really hoped for better performance from open source software. As I've posted, with a few exceptions, that hasn't happened.
I've used the KOMA-script versions of report, article and book, and I've also used the letter template that comes with LyX. Yesterday was the first time I ever tried to use one of the examples that come with LyX.
I have no idea what KOMA-script is, but no need to explain it. I don't think I'm ready to absorb the details. LOL LyX looks to be rather out of the box from you basic office suite thinking, and I want to get that under control before getting into any tweaking.
For those reading this, that may be interested in the commercial program I'm trying now, it's called Scrivener. Print output I want will probably not be possible, but I really like it's ability to keep research info with different file formats withing the Scrivener program itself. So I need only one program running rather than a number of programs.
With scant documentation, the only way to figure out how the example worked was trial and error. I wanted to concentrate on getting the document done, not futz around with the example.
EXACTLY!! As I've posted in other open source places, I DON'T want to be their beta tester, I want to use the software.
Something good did come out of this. In searching for information about moderncv, I chanced upon this site: http://www.latextemplates.com
Looks very interesting, I've bookmarked it. Thanks.
They have a template based on moderndv very similar to the example that comes with LyX, but the TeX source file has complete and detailed comments. So I switched to TeXShop and got good results right away. First time I've had to do that. I like the words of the Kiwi whose site it is: "I am by no means an expert on LaTeX, but I recognize that others are similar to myself and only want to use LaTeX as a tool to create a document, without having to dig around in forums for solutions on how to tweak the document in some small way. There is no reason that LaTeX cannot be a simple platform for creating documents where little more is required than to change example text to your own text in a pre-configured template. To this end, templates on this website have been carefully pulled apart, cleaned up and made easier to use for the average person just starting to use LaTeX."
This sounds like the average computer user, we just want to use the product, not tweak it, test it, etc. I like this attitude, compared to some attitudes I've seen expressed.
I learned a long time ago, I don't want to program computers.
-- Rich
<snip remaining text> -- Ken Mac OS X 10.8.5 Firefox 24.0 Thunderbird 17.0.8 LibreOffice 4.1.1.2
