On Thursday 29 May 2003 01:00, Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > DA>> What about lyx? It does all the dirty latex work for you > DA>> automatically, has a very powerful math editor, and since > DA>> version 1.3x with its qt interface it has what must be the best > > Well, as of then lyx was incapable of doing so many things (starting from > the basics: tables and non-trivial equations) that it had to be ruled out > almost immediately. It, however, served its role in teaching me how LaTeX > document should look and I had picked it from there. Again, it certainly > may be a great progress in this area nowdays, I didn't follow it - is it > indeed possible and easy to write, say, coursework on some math subject in > Hebrew (equations, tables, diagrams, etc.) using LyX only? As easy as in > Word and even easier?
Equations are definitely much easier and more powerful than just about anywhere else. Tables seem to be ok, I just played with them for a few minutes - it lets you determine the number of rows and columns, add and remove them, etc. You can also turn specific borders (external or internal) of the table on and off, and set horizontal and vertical alignment of what's in the cells. Other than that, the cells are containers for bits of contents, which can be absolutely anything you might put outside the table. So you can have a table inside another table's cell, etc. Diagrams: it can insert images and such, but doesn't edit them in any way. You need to use a separate tool to create graphs etc. As for writing Hebrew math coursework - I haven't tried, but I think it would be quite easy, a _lot_ better than with msword (unless msword has gotten significantly better since I last used it). There are things like fex. inline formulas, which are part of your line of text and "flow" to remain between the two words where you inserted them. IIRC in msword I could never make pictures and formulas flow with the text properly, because they were always in principle tied to the location on the page and the text flowed around them. As for Hebrew in general and mixing it with English and with formulas, it works seamlessly. You should definitely try it out. > > DA>> In fact, the Hebrew support of msoffice is another set of myths: > DA>> that there is no good Hebrew support in "alternative" office > DA>> suites, and also that msword's rtl logic is correct and should > DA>> be emulated. > > Msword's RTL logic is rather faulty, as is it in other MS products. There > are some reasons for that, including (but not limited to) those outside of > MS domain (for example, one cannot blame MS for '-' meaning three things > in one character and all the problems that follow from it) but the > question is - do we have something better? Well as far as RTL logic goes, we do, lyx's much better. If lyx itself isn't what we want in a word/doc processor, the same logic can be used in any other app. It may be that this logic wouldn't specify the experts on rtl - it doesn't use logical parenthesis, and such things, and perhaps does other things that are incorrect in principle - but it's intuitive for me, where msword and other apps were not. That's what I care about first of all. > > DA>> During this last week I've been using lyx (1.3.2 with the qt > DA>> interface and configured as per Dekel Tsur's site) to write > > Well, I guess it is time for an experiment. I will (probably on weekend or > next week) d/l lyx and try to move one of my present works (consisting of > some pretty trivial formatting) to it. If it works - I'm one happy man, if > it doesn't - well, tough luck. Remember you need to configure both lyx and your tex installation for Hebrew first - google for hebrew in lyx. Moving existing stuff into or out of lyx isn't its strong point unfortunately. Unless what you have can be exported into latex, you'll have to just copy the text and reapply all formatting markups. > DA>> I think any user could make the switch to the lyx mindset, and > DA>> that most would be very happy once they got rid of the > DA>> compulsive need for manually arranging font sizes and > DA>> whitespace. > > Well, here's a problem. I *hate* when some dumb program tries to tell me > what my whitespaces should be. It may give me the tools to do the right > (from its POV) thing, but it should always give me enough rope. That's > what I despise windows systems for - they are made to protect the user > from himself, and I positively hate systems with this design. Must be > something personal. lyx doesn't have whitespace as such in its editor because, the argument goes, you don't know what the pagination and line wrapping will look like in the generated document, so you shouldn't try to align anything anywhere or insert any empty lines (rather change the distance between these two paragraphs) or more than one space in a row. I like this behavior, myself. You can override it, though not by very much because it's the very basis of the way lyx behaves. You can use nonbreaking spaces to nisert several of them in a row, or edit lyx's config files to change its styles and how the output looks wrt whitespace. You can also change lyx's editing look somewhat via its config files (and config dialog). I never wanted to do so, so I don't really know how far this goes. > > DA>> shortcoming of lyx though; it just isn't meant to edit WYSIWYG > DA>> stuff. > > Well, then criticizing the Office (which *is* meant for that) one should > propose the anternative. Do we have one? Do people really need WYSIWYG? I think the majority does not. At least those working with msword. They don't really need to know, and manually set, the exact font or font size used in their level 3 headings. I think the WYSIWYM philosophy suits the great majority of tasks much better. In what situations do people really need to see on the screen something as similar as possible to the future printed output? When designing a postcard or a calendar, perhaps, but not when writing a letter or article. MS themselves have a separate msoffice program for these people, in fact - Publisher. msword isn't meant for the cases whre WYSIWYG really counts. So we do have an alternative - convert people to the far better WYSIWYM mindset, and let them use lyx (which exists on windows as well, after all, although there a latex installation can't be taken for granted as it can be on a unix). -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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