On 12/30/2021 8:46 AM, Steve Litt via lyx-users wrote:
Wolfgang Engelmann via lyx-users said on Mon, 27 Dec 2021 11:31:55 +0100
This has shocked me
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
Would be interesting to see how LyX performs
My first two books were written in WordPerfect 5.1. The next one was
written in MS Word. All the rest were written in LyX. I was happy with
all of them.
My worst nightmare would be authoring in raw LaTeX. By the time I
remembered the necessary LaTeX tag, I would have forgotten the point I
was trying to make in my writing.
LaTeX is a *lousy* native format for a document. It's suitable only for
fixed line PDF/paper. It's extremely difficult to convert to flowing
text HTML or ePub, unless you want to (urk) use Pandoc, with all the
implied compromises on appearance. In my opinion LaTeX should be only
an intermediate component in the authoring stack, that component being
for creating fixed-line PDF/paper.
Plain TeX would be much better than LaTeX, as a native format, if it
could handle fonts well. Does anyone know of a Plain TeX to LuaTeX or
XeTeX converter?
I'm working on an authoring tool whose native format is a Markdown
superset, with complete support of arbitrary styles. It's pretty easy
to go from that format to HTML or ePub, but to go from there to
fixed-line PDF/paper without using (urk) Pandoc is a challenge. But not
nearly as big of a challenge as going from LaTeX to semantic HTML.
Getting back to LyX, one of my books, "Key to Everyday Excellence",
could not have been written in WordPerfect or MSWord because the
(fictional) plot is so date driven that the current plot date appears
in the header. And although I used styles-based authoring in
WordPerfect and MSWord, I like that LyX enforces styles-based
authoring. LyX is quite a fast authoring environment --- the only way
it could be faster is to get rid of mouse usage.
In my opinion, for a document over 10K words, LyX beats the authoring
speed and ease of MSWord.
This discussion wouldn't be complete without including LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is a style-losing piece of junk fit only for
fingerpainting. Those who characterize LibreOffice as a substitute for
MSWord either don't use styles-based authoring, or they're fooling
themselves, or they know something I don't know.
By the way, my new book, "Making Mental Models: Advanced Edition", just
came out yesterday. It's made almost exclusively with LyX, Inkscape,
and shellscripts. A big thank you goes out to the LyX team who made
this possible.
SteveT
Steve,
I always enjoy reading about your experiences with various document
production systems, in part because I can relate to so much of it. While
I haven't written books, in my former profession as a trial and
appellate lawyer, I wrote countless legal briefs and documents. Most
legal briefs run about 30 pages or so and share much of the formatting
as books; a cover page, front matter with table of contents and a table
of authorities and main matter with section headings, formatted text
with headers, footers and footnotes. When presenting a brief in the U.S.
Supreme Court, one presents it in the format of a paper-back book. The
lawyer prepares the fully formatted document and then sends it to
specialized legal publishers for final printing. In my case, I used
WordPerfect for Windows as that is what my publisher preferred at the time.
I am old enough that I began with DOS and PC-Write. I graduated to
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, then WP for Windows and later to Word. Finally,
because I am cheap and actually read and try to abide by software
license agreements, I downloaded StarOffice and have used it along with
its various subsequent descendants including OpenOffice.org and now
LibreOffice 7.x. I am sorry that you have had bad experiences with
LibreOffice as I have always found it to be quite faithful and every bit
as easy to use as MS-Word. In my years of use, I have never had it lose
or mangle my styles. I don't think I'm fooling myself and I definitely
use styles-based authoring, and I can tell I certainly don't know any
more than you. It just works and, I often find that, when I try other
systems, including LyX, LaTeX or an HTML oriented RMarkdown, I go back
to LibreOffice to just get work done.
I agree with your assessment about LaTeX and LyX. When writing in LaTeX,
I also get distracted by the many times I have to type \command{text}.
When I found LyX, I was thrilled to see it shield me from so much LaTeX
coding. I can even type a dollar sign in LyX ($) without having to
remember to precede it with with a backslash to avoid slipping into math
mode. I can't imagine trying to write a book in LaTeX code. But, I
wouldn't hesitate to use LyX. I also agree it relies too much on the mouse.
I now teach at a local college and, for one of my classes, I wanted my
students to do a book report on Charles Sheldon's book, /In His Steps/.
Since it is an old book and now in the public domain, I decided to
download it and create free formatted copies for my students to download
and read. For fun (I'm weird, I know), I turned it into a exercise to
compare different document processing systems.
I downloaded the book in plain text form and, after stripping out
unnecessary line endings, tabs, and spaces, loaded it into the different
systems. For my test, I used LibreOffice, LyX, a plain LaTeX editor
(TeXWorks, I believe) and a Markdown system (ReStructuredText -- This
was before I had discovered RStudio). At the time, my aim was to create
PDF files from LibreOffice, LyX and TeXWorks and an HTML file with
ReStructuredText.
I found that, of the systems, LyX was the easiest and "safest" to use in
the sense that it produced the least surprises. TeXWorks also worked
well as my formatting was very simple and, since I wasn't composing
text, the LaTeX commands weren't an imposition. ReStructuredText gave me
the most compromises, perhaps in part because my destination file was
HTML. Finally LibreOffice also worked extremely well. I used page,
paragraph and character styles and it all worked with no lost styles. My
main objection with LibreOffice was that, every now and then over the
course of 188 pages, I found random double spaces between words or stray
line or paragraph endings that I had to fix. LyX just ignores such
things, which is nice.
All of the systems produced excellent results. In short, I have learned
that, whatever system one learns to use well, s/he will be proficient at
producing the desired results. I think I agree with you, however, that,
if I were actually writing the book and not just formatting it, I would
have preferred LyX. I do love its editor, which forces me to use styles
without allowing the formatting to get in the way of writing.
It reminds me of a study done back in the days of DOS vs. Mac. The study
claimed that DOS users made better writers than Mac users. The argument
was that DOS users focused on content while Mac users focused on
appearance and formatting. I don't know how valid it was, but since I
was reluctant to make the move from DOS to Windows, I liked what it
said. Today, I find that, when I'm using LibreOffice, I fiddle much more
with formatting while I type than I do when using LyX. It takes a lot of
discipline to write with a WYSIWYG editor without getting distracted
from substance.
Virgil
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