LyX – The Document Processor | Hacker News Reader

LyX – The Document Processor

lyx.org

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LyX has been a constant in my life and I'm very thankful for it. It's such well-written piece of software, it still makes me happy every time I use it!

I remember reading their (excellent) tutorial on a laptop with a 700 MHz CPU and a few hundred MB of RAM in 2005 or so.

This reminded me to donate to them - their page is down, but you can send a donation via PayPal to donations@lyx.org.

I more than likes the editor LyX. Hehe,

A few weeks ago (Who am I kidding? It was before the pandemic started) a friend pickup my chromebook of all things and asked me where the "Google Docs app was?" Beyond the obvious humor, I, at that moment, realized that my document production workflow was just LyX and I didn't even keep a shortcut to the gDoc web app anymore. What would I need it for?

It feels like it has been that way for at least a decade. Amazing software can really feel timeless. I'm going to donate as well.

Well this brings back memories!

I used LyX for all my work at university (over 20 years ago) and I vividly remember the difference in experience compared with my girlfriend at the time who used Word for all her work. LyX was such a stress-free experience in comparison, you could simply sit down and write, knowing that it would almost certainly look good at the end. In comparison, my gf would spend stressful hours battling to keep graphs in the righ place, sections structured properly, and references all managed correctly.

It warms my heart to know that LyX is still going all these years later, even though I have no need of it nowadays.

T obe fair all of this is the work of TeX not Lyx itself.

Lyx makes LaTeX accessible to way more people, myself included.

Did she use styles in Word?

I've been using Lyx for a decade and only recently did I find another use case for it. Since you get instant visualization and feedback it's actually really good for giving live lectures with, since the Latex inputs are just fast enough to track your voice. Here's an example of that:

https://youtu.be/HMmOk9GIhsw

I do believe they need a new website. That or this post has generated so much interest the world is hitting their server hard.

All seriousness aside, I am a LaTeX user, so I get it. But to me one drawback of LaTeX is that it isn't hierarchically structured in the same way that, say DocBook XML, is. That is, you can't automatically pull out a 3rd level section (all the text under a subsubsection) like you can using XML and an XSLT. Nor can you label such a subsubsection with a "role" (DocBook XML term) and either include it or not include it in your PDF, depending on a parameter that you provide on a command line. (We did that to produce technical and non-technical versions of PDFs.) Rather, I think you have to give what amounts to begin{} and end{} commands.

Correct me if I'm wrong!

BTW, another wysiwym editor is XMLmind--for XML (mostly DocBook), obviously. I think oXygen also does that, although I've only used XMLmind.

I haven't come across a method to toggle parts, chapters or sections directly, but you can get pretty close by including them from separate files, then calling `includeonly`. Perhaps also look at the `import` package: https://ctan.org/pkg/import.

If that is not for you, then yes, a custom environment (`begin`/ `end`) would be my next attempt. As for the engine, definitely use lua(la)tex, where -- perhaps -- the Lua integration can come in handy for this too.

While I don't use LaTeX much (I've got my own plain TeX formats which I want to move to LaTeX), TeX is Turing-complete so you could easily devise a mechanism to achieve just that. I am sure there are extensions which do that already.

LyX is great. It's been an utter boon to me as I have disgraphia and can't read my own handwriting.

Wrote almost all my notes in undergrad in it. Wrote at least my first paper of my PhD in it, before moving to latex directly for more control.

I still use LyX today if I need to do some mathematical working. Being able to cut and paste math really is a huge enhancement. I can't imagine writing proofs without it

I went to a snobby engineering college. Freshman year I learned about LaTeX but it was really complicated. I found LyX and loved it! I sent it in for a paper. A TA gave me bonus points for obviously using LaTeX. They were disappointed that I had used LyX. I still think about that a lot.

My dad took a proof I wrote in word equation editor for grad school admissions, rewrote it in LaTeX, and told me that this template will serve me well for the rest of my life. 20 years later and I still use on the regular!

Side note: my dad—to this day—still feels like a failure for using LaTeX; as he once put it: Real scholars use TeX.

I think many a scientific journal requires LaTeX for submissions since it allows them to simply apply their own style to it (some will even provide their templates).

I always felt like failing to move to LaTeX from my own set of macros in Plain TeX mostly because I had my own stuff for ToC generation, code snippet syntax highlighting and cross-page continuation, and image embedding that I felt lazy to learn LaTeX.

I have done work in LaTeX simply because it was too complicated to do in LyX. I would never regret using a simpler, easier tool. That's not snobbishness, that's masochism.

Wrote my Bachelors dissertation in LyX, and my Masters thesis in LaTeX with vim. In my experience, while LyX has a lower learning curve, it could be difficult to make it behave in exactly the way I wanted, and once I put in the effort to learn LaTeX, I found it easier to get my documents formatted exactly the way I wanted.

This was over ten years ago, and YMMV.

I think I tried LyX at least 5 times during grad school, but I couldn't quite get into it.

LyX's preview rendered simple math expressions alright, but it couldn't really render the custom math expressions (which required LaTeX math packages) that I needed for my dissertation. I eventually just settled on full LaTeX -- there's a slight learning curve, but ironically LaTeX felt easier to use and slightly more predictable than LyX because I didn't have to work around a bunch of limitations around displaying the final output (through ERTs).

Also, aesthetics mattered to me. The LyX rendering was an approximation of the final output (WYSIWYM), whereas the LaTeX generated PDF was actually the final output. The latter actually looked beautiful and I'd rather be able to see the actual final product than a WYSIWYM approximation of it (LyX does produce a PDF but it always felt like there was an additional abstraction layer separating the writing and the output, whereas LaTeX was more straightforward).

This mattered to me because I was writing long mathematical arguments with complicated expressions, which I had to inspect for correctness. I was also using TikZ a lot for diagrams and working with TikZ via ERTs wasn't ideal.

No knock on LyX -- it does serve a certain niche. But I also want to say to those who struggle with LyX, it may be worth the investment to write LaTeX directly.

Sounds like you would've benefited from a couple of useful LyX features:

* A critical and unfortunately very well hidden feature of LyX is "instant preview" (disabled by default, you have to enable it in preferences). This runs each individual equation through LaTeX so the equations you see are not some rough approximation of the PDF but very literally what you'll see. You can also manually make preview environments to wrap around ERTs like your TikZ diagrams. In both cases, when you actually edit the equation or ERT you'll still get the classic editor. Apart from that, it makes it feel like you're really editing the PDF directly.

* Another useful well-hidden feature is math macros. These are a lot like LaTeX's \newcommand, except that in LyX a math macro has three parts: the command name (plus any arguments), what literal LaTeX should be output, and a visual approximation to show up in equations that you're editing. That means that if there's some command in a package that LyX doesn't recognise (e.g. \foo) then you can make your own name for it (e.g. \myfoo), map its real LaTeX to \foo and its LyX display to whatever LyX-recognised features look vaguely like the real thing and then use that macro in your equations. Admittedly, this does require more upfront effort than using the LaTeX package directly but I think the payoff can be worth it.

I no longer write LaTeX but I appreciate this. Hopefully it helps LyX users.

I eventually discovered, after some introspection, that I preferred finer-grained control vs a WYSIWYM interface, because I enjoy working with code and don't mind markup all that much. It's a preference that I'd arrived at for myself but certainly appreciate that there are diverse positions on this.

The LyX editor for math is ridiculously competent. Even using plain LaTeX, LyX can be used just for the maths because it is so quick. I can't imagine the math for which LyX would be insufficient.

It doesn't render like tex in the editor, but it is logically correct.

LyX has a "tag" for plain tex, which allows you to insert any tex file into your document. That is a practical way of working with TikZ, for example.

Maybe using LyX's basic functionality has a shallower learning curve than LaTeX, but to use it effectively and completely I find you need to know all about LaTeX anyway, so by definition you actually need more knowledge. I think a lot of people go through a similar process to you, learning LyX first and then finding they can do more when they switch to LaTeX. I suspect if they returned to LyX some time later they'd find they still benefit from editing the vast majority of their document in the graphical view, while also being able to break out into raw LaTeX for the few features that LyX doesn't support.

I was lucky enough to do it the opposite way round to you: I learned LaTeX first and typeset a few documents in it (including an undergraduate thesis) before coming across LaTeX, and that's how I'd recommend others learn it (well, maybe without typesetting a whole thesis in LaTeX!). I found the increase in productivity was literally a factor of three: I was writing up notes for a course in LaTeX and found they took roughly 9 hours for each 3 hour lecture, whereas when I switched to LyX I could write up each lecture in 3 hours. Ultimately I wrote my PhD thesis in LyX, and that took many months so I shudder to think what would've happened if I had had to use LaTeX!

Oh, it seems it has received the hug of death.

I have do say I was always fascinated by the idea of Lyx, but ended up using Emacs + AUCTex (I think?) for authoring my papers... but it was a different time and LyX was perhaps a bit to late to arrive for me gain any use from it. I think I was about done with my studies when I became aware of it, at least.

Great to see others posting positive experiences about working with it because it "sounded" about right for authoring and yet not having to fiddle excessively with details and/or formatting issues.

LyX probably raised my college GPA by a tenth of a point all on its own just by ensuring I could refer to equations in old papers and still read them later. It’s been well over a decade somehow and I’m still grateful. Amazing tool.

If curious see also

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858445

2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099493

2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7648378

2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180318

LyX is fantastic. I used it for a long time. At some point I switched to TeXstudio [1], which is no longer WYSIWYG, but a great general LaTeX editor:

"Some of the outstanding features of TeXstudio are an integrated pdf viewer with (almost) word-level synchronization, live inline preview, advanced syntax-highlighting, live checking of references, citations, latex commands, spelling and grammar."

[1] https://github.com/texstudio-org/texstudio

TeXStudio is also what I recommend to LaTeX beginners and intermediates. Otherwise, VSCode with LaTeX Workshop works great. It has the huge advantage of being a general-purpose editor, since I don't like the idea of having one IDE per language.

Other than that, the second part of "integrated pdf viewer with (almost) word-level synchronization" is not really TeXStudio's achievement, if they leverage SyncTeX [0] for this.

[0]: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93laurens.pdf

I wrote all my Master thesis and reports with TeXstudio. It's a great piece of software, very accessible.

LyX saved me so much time over LaTeX in college. I recommend it completely for students who need to typeset math homework quickly.

I always wondered about an alternate universe where Apple adapted LyX and LaTeX to make Pages a real-time LaTeX editor.

How does this compare to TeXmacs? Afaik these are the two most popular visual TeX editors.

https://www.texmacs.org

I've used both, and I prefer TeXmacs. Despite what the name might apply, TeXmacs is not built on top of TeX. This is a good thing. It's much less bloated (60 MB vs several GB), and compilations seem much faster. Highly extensible/programmable with GNU Guile (hoping they'll transition to Guile 3 train soon) + plugins. UI is better than 95% of FOSS apps.

LyX requires a LaTeX (or LuaTeX/XeTeX) installation, and comes with its lot of pros and cons. Access to massive universe of *TeX packages. LyX seems more widely used.

> Despite what the name might apply, TeXmacs is not built on top of TeX. This is a good thing. It's much less bloated (60 MB vs several GB), and compilations seem much faster.

TeX is not several GB. It was designed for systems running under intense resource constraints, and it is tiny.

Most widely used TeX installations (TeXLive is the big one) bundle lots of the most popularly used packages by default, but that's an option, and they can be installed on demand as needed. Even granting the reasonable point that modern TeX is functionally useless without packages (and other essential accouterments such as PDFTeX rather than Knuth's original code), I stripped down TeXLive to the packages I actually need (which is an easy choice in the installer, not some arcane hack), and it's about 300 MB.

TeXmacs is its own thing inspired by TeX. LyX is a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX (which is a thing on top of TeX).

The LyX folks would say it's a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean). Great tool. I wrote my dissertation and several papers on it, and it was a huge time saver, and a great way to focus on the content, not the form.

TeXmacs is not built on top of TeX. It is closer to a Lisp.

Yeah that's some pretty terrible naming. Why would you name something that is not based on TeX TeXmacs. Next you're going to tell me it isn't a Mac app.

It isn't anything to do with Emacs either :-)

I really wish we could have LyX functionality in source editors for comment blocks. I end up having to maintain an accompanying LyX/LaTeX file for every piece of serious scientific code I write, because there's a massive gap of intelligibility between the math and its optimized implementation in code, and sticking LaTeX source or other text approximation of complex formulas into the comments hardly helps at all.

I wrote a sizeable chunk of documentation for astronomical software with LyX about 15 years ago. The concept is excellent and in general I like it. There were some rough edges - especially with table & image handling, but in general it's pretty neat. I should probably give it another go some day.

I'm glad LyX is going strong in 2020. A friend of mine suggested me LyX many years ago - he wrote a thesis on their EE department. On the other hand, we in the Math department had to learn Latex, because well, it is standard in that field.

These days I'm using org-mode [1] because I can easily dump something in Latex/PDF (which I prefer) and export that in Word or odt (which I don't like) but is standard in the corporate world. However, when I see someone is struggling with Latex (or is scared of it), I suggest LyX with all my heart. I believe LyX can be a good entry for Latex world.

[1] https://orgmode.org

LyX is incredible. Hats off to the contributors. I use it for journaling, writing papers back in college, and even for sketching out ideas. One of my favorite programs that's always one of the first things I install after a fresh format :)

Personally, I always found that LyX kinda defeated the purpose of writing documents in LaTeX. The focus is supposed to be on the content rather than how it looks. This does sort of require that you have a good handle on all the commands you are likely to need while writing the document, but it didn't take me that long to learn all the common mathematical symbols I would use and most of my document structure would be templated.

I agree with this completely. Whenever I open up a libreoffice document or any WYSIWYG editor I get so anxious. I like saying \cite{x} instead of seeing the citation, etc.

WYSIWYM is a great idea. I still resent Word 97 (?) for removing the flowed view, leaving only pages. Who needs pages on a computer?

What I found torturous about LyX was trying to configure the underlying LaTeX generator, so that it used the style files I was made to use. If I remember correctly, there was some layer of conversion that I wasted a lot of time on.

Can I haz LyX without so much LaTeX :P?

Used this to write my master dissertation back in 2003-2004. At least for me it is how every word processor should be, like an IDE, a front-end for CLI tools that are in turn amenable to automation (I used a Makefile to sanity check and generate the final document versions.)

LyX is great piece of software. People interested in LyX should also take a look at TeXmacs https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

I wrote my master's thesis in LyX. Great halfway point between Latex and full WYSIWYG.

Great tool, I wish they documented its architecture in this series of books:

http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

Has anyone kept on using it after their thesis days??

I do -- it is my go-to personal document-writing system. Working with others requires either Overleaf or Docs.

Why not plain text? org-mode or similar?

The equation handling is sublime. I am a physicist, so my quick write-ups include plenty of trips into math-mode.

If I am making a to-do list (and not using taskwarrior), vim is it.

My post thesis days have brought me to the corporate world where Word and PowerPoint rule the land.

I work as a quant (developing pricing models for power and gas trading shop) - I use LyX to write documentations for my models. And yes, I did use it to write my PhD thesis and several papers.

Nope, because in the corporate world you need to collaborate or allow others who likely don't know LaTeX to work with the documents you write.

Know a guy who introduced SharedLaTeX at a security consulting firm. Apparently they all liked it.

I remember trying to use this when I did an undergrad math course. My tutor went on about latex and such, I remember being very confused about the whole thing. Thus was prior to any knowledge on my part about markup languages or programming. I simply couldn't use it, I ended up using libreoffice with its equation editor. It worked for me at the time.

Now if I was doing something math related I'd probably try a combination of pandoc markdown with mathjax.

Delighted to see that this is still going and that development appears to be very active.

Yes that's unexpected, also it can be installed with brew. Until now I still prefer Latex + vim over Word/Libreoffice a lot to write letters, also since I can put them in git. But Lyx is actually so much better

LyX is training wheels for LaTeX.

Wow, I remember using LyX in 1998 to write my CS paper.

Wrote my master thesis in Fluid dynamics (transition to turbulence) in LyX 11 years ago. Great experience! Great Software!

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