On Wednesday 28 May 2003 23:47, Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > The problem, however, is that to make some basic things in LaTeX takes > considerable time, but to make them in Word takes much less time - and it > so happens that the set of these tasks has considerable intersection with > the set of tasks Joe User and Jane Secretary face daily. While I admire > the power of LaTeX, I remember that trying to write my coursework > once using only LaTeX turned out to be somewhat frustrating experience.
What about lyx? It does all the dirty latex work for you automatically, has a very powerful math editor, and since version 1.3x with its qt interface it has what must be the best Hebrew and mixed rtl/ltr support of all word/doc processors I've ever used (out of msword 6 through 2000, kword 1.0 through 1.2 and openoffice 1.1b1). It's both powerful and intuitive; it does automatically, and very well, many of the things I had to struggle with msword to achieve, and some which were impossible there. (Of course, not having to track font formatting manually helps a lot, too :-) In fact, the Hebrew support of msoffice is another set of myths: that there is no good Hebrew support in "alternative" office suites, and also that msword's rtl logic is correct and should be emulated. During this last week I've been using lyx (1.3.2 with the qt interface and configured as per Dekel Tsur's site) to write mixed-language documents, with some "advanced" features such as inline formulas. I'll be very uncomfortable the next time I'm forced to work with msword, or with oowriter for that matter (which seems to make a goal of imitating the msword interface). I think any user could make the switch to the lyx mindset, and that most would be very happy once they got rid of the compulsive need for manually arranging font sizes and whitespace. Yes, it doesn't have some features that msoffice does. It doesn't have embedding of documents from other msoffice apps (and windows apps in general), it doesn't have revision tracking support yet (I hope they add it soon), and so on. However, it seems to me that you need most of these are things when editing a document is a goal in itself - not when your goal is creating finalized output (ps, pdf, printed output). And a great many people will probably be satisfied with that. It also doesn't have import/export filters for other wordprocessors' formats, including msoffice. With kword and maybe also oowriter getting latex import/export filters that'll be somewhat remedied, but still not nearly enough for people who need to exchange docs regularly with msoffice/openoffice users. For them lyx is indeed the wrong tool. This is not a real shortcoming of lyx though; it just isn't meant to edit WYSIWYG stuff. -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
pgp00000.pgp
Description: signature
