LyX – The Document Processor
lyx.org
lyx.org
The end-result of good looking LaTeX documents, without (most of [1]) the pain.
I recently adapted a colleague's document from LaTeX and it was simply easier to redraw a slightly complex table in LyX than to understand the table markup. I think he'd be disheartened to learn how fast it was to produce the table.
Writing math is also a no-brainer compared to LaTeX. Whenever my LaTeX-using colleagues see me writing stuff in LyX, and the screen is filled with semantics rules that basically look just like they'll look in the final PDF, they go "yeah, I really have to check out LyX some time..."
Mostly they end up never checking out LyX and sticking with LaTeX, to their loss, but I've managed to convert a few people over!
([1] the remaining pain is related to dealing with conference and journal style files, which often have quirks in LaTeX, and adding LyX on top sometimes demands an extra layer of adaptation.)
Can't you even import some of those?
I've been using it for years for pretty much everything that other people would use LibreOffice or Office for.
While it complicates things a bit when dealing with custom or non-standard LaTeX layouts, it makes writing so much easier and more efficient.
One way to get the best of both worlds is to write the document in LyX until it is almost done (except some weird layout things for journals) and then export it to LaTeX and give it the final touches there.
I've written several papers in LyX, and I think it was a great way to get started with LaTeX. The main trouble I had with it was collaboration --- since it was a desktop app that not many (possibly none?) of my colleagues used, I couldn't really get anyone else to contribute, except by asking for them to provide text and then mostly manually inserting it back in to LyX.
In the end, they convinced me to just write LaTeX source into an EtherPad, which was fine once I got used to it. And Overleaf is basically just a refinement of this idea.
I hope that Overleaf's rich text mode also helps people climbs LaTeX's notoriously steep learning curve, and I hope it saves them from some of the collaboration problems that I had when I was doing the same. We have some evidence that it is helping, such as these high school students who somehow managed to write a 300 page report in LaTeX using Overleaf [1]. I think that's amazing!
[1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas-building-r...
LyX supports change tracking similar to other wordprocessors so you can see who edited/added/deleted which part of the document.
I eventually settled on Texmaker as it incorporates all the features to allow me to write documents quickly, while still maintaining the LaTeX way of doing things.
Lyx and Zotero+LyZ made for a quite fine thesis workflow. LyX files are plain text and thus easily managed in git.
I then started to hack on it and did some code (InsetGraphics), most likely since then that code was replaced already but it was fun and the community around it was amazing.
I'm still using it from time to time to create great looking documents when corporate doesn't require an official Word template.
One of the advantages of Lyx is that it builds on Latex and its extensions, which thanks to tens of years of development is very mature and feature rich. If something that you want to do with Lyx isn't supported you can just use raw (La)tex script. For example I used it for autonumbering of chemical compounds.
Or, you have a third-party APT repository specified in `/etc/apt/sources.list{,.d/*}` that you didn't install the keys for.
Or the NSA.
Here's a (partial) listing of the dependencies that were automatically selected sorted by download size†:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/950vm93v1ncna6x/lyx_synaptic.png?d...
So you can avoid a lot of your disk space usage by excluding‡ the -doc packages.
†: I haven't figured out how to get Synaptic to show estimations of unpacked sizes on a per-package basis
‡: In aptitude, `- .*-doc` I think?
You can probably get a Word document to look great as well but in LaTeX it happens by default. It actually provides you proper typographical advantages without you needing to know anything about them.
Here's a page showing the effect of using microtype, and some tips of usage: [1]
Styles are more emphasized - the UI will nudge you away from manually changing the font size of one line and towards defining styles for different things. Word has that functionality but it's not quite front-and-center in the same way.
I use LyX for non-maths. It renders nice-looking PDFs (I use it for my CV (well these days I use Kile instead, but same principle)). It's a pretty marginal choice though honestly.
I compile my cv using latex. And once I had to make a few changes to my cv. So I used their service from my office. It worked pretty well for my use case.
PS: I have no affiliation with them.
Besides that, though, it's just OK.
At the end of the Semester, my notes were the only searchable ones (not to mention easiest to read) :)
At least, that is my experience.
Unlike LyX, TeXmacs actually has WYSIWYG editing. LyX only provides a rough approximation of the output.
Moreover, the real-time typesetter in TeXmacs rivals the output of TeX/LaTeX. In some ways, it is better.
TeXmacs is also better for academia but most universities, conferences, and journals are behind the times... so graduate students and professors are still stuck with LaTeX.
if the above sentence is not followed by:
> "because [explain reason]"
my BS detector state is usually set to 'Red Alert'.
Moreover, the real-time typesetter in TeXmacs rivals the output quality of TeX/LaTeX. In some ways, it is better.
LyX does not intent to be a WYSIWYG editor. It is a WYSIWYM editor. It is the same as some people prefer Microsoft Word and others prefer Markdown.
That said, I never use it for a document I'm going to send to collaborators unless they are really onboard with it first.
1. Emacs keybindings/window layout. If you aren't used to thinking in buffers and don't know which is the meta key, this can be very confusing.
2. TeXmacs uses TeX, not LaTeX, in the backend, though there are export/import commands. Makes it necessary to do some wrangling to get documents to match prescribed formats.
TeXmacs fails at usability right off the bat, even being unfamiliar to those used to Emacs keyboard chords (it's sort of implied in the name to be for that use-case), and I found it a little better after changing it to a CUA mode (I think it was called "GNOME Look and Feel"?). Finding crap in the toolbars and menu was obtuse, or even what all the keyboard shortcuts were. And then there was the fact that it was super-easy to crash and lose all your work in an instant. I found a particularly nasty case where just changing the type of header (chapter, sub-chapter, etc) crashed TeXmacs and caused all further attempts to open the file to crash the program immediately... grr
I would love if TeXmacs improves, or has improved, but I absolutely can't recommend it for serious work. Way too crash-happy, on both Debian and Windows systems. LyX is rock-solid stable, on the other hand (and has fewer "gotchas" due to its lack of WYSYWIG).
It's confusing as hell, though.
Thanks a bunch.
1. Support for the Greek language is not good
2. Found it difficult to manage and create my own templates