On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Garst R. Reese wrote:
> Allan Rae wrote:
>
> > "Unlike some of our competitors, LyX has moved word
> > processing beyond the mundane and complicated user-placement
> > method of page formatting to automated document processing
> > and typesetting. LyX is ideal for preparing and publishing
> > professional-quality documents ranging from textbooks and
> > technical reports, to articles for submission to professional
> > journals and conferences, to letters and faxes.
> OK, but a huge percentage of Word and WP users could care less about
> textbooks, technical reports, articles for submission to professional
> journals and conferences.
Maybe but then WP users would just get a free copy of WP8 as Asger pointed
out over the weekend.
Who is our target audience?
I wrote the above with the aim of saying "here's a tool that is aimed at
the technical markets and is especially useful for large documents like
books." We could arguably claim that LyX is much better at production of
technical documents than any of the major word-processing packages for
Windows. We could instead compare ourselves to FrameMaker which is more
of a document-level processor.
LyX is also good for other stuff as you point out below.
> Letters and faxes they can already do, but I think Richard's MM stuff
> could be a big win.
But its an unofficial patch and won't be in the 1.0 release.
If we've cleaned it and polished it enough it might make it into 1.0.1
bit I don't think we want to be forced to support that method in the new
development series -- a better implementation using insets is supposed to
be on the cards.
> Newsletters are also a very big issue, and they do
> need MM. I am also looking into a newsletter .cls. Richard also raises
> the font issue. Yes, Word and WP users abuse fonts, but I don't think
> that making it very difficult is the answer.
> Another idea is a Genealogy.cls, but I really don't know anything about
> that one.
> > LyX is able to provide professional typographic results by
> > utilising the LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) typesetting system.
> > LaTeX has been used for many years in the production of
> > textbooks with complex mathematics and provides exceptional
> > support for automatically placing tables, figures, graphs
> Think about placing photographs, cartoons, advertissments. Look at the
> mail; LyX is already getting the academic users, but I will be very
> happy if I never have to write another journal article:) It's story
> telling time.
Fair enough.
I was going to add a few other words to the list in the original statement
but they seemed superfluous (",images, algorithms and so forth.").
> BTW, for all of you arguing about who's the oldest, my eldest
> granddaughter just informed me that I am an impending greatgrandfather.
Skite. :P
Allan. (ARRae)
