Having used Word (4,5 95, 97) for many years in industry (it was a corporate standard)
and at home, and having also used many other document preparation tools on Windoze and
Unix, I would like to add my tuppence worth to this. Just to be clear, this is not a
rant against word, but a comment that for some jobs Word may not be the best tool.
I am using LyX to prepare conference papers and also my PhD thesis. What I find really
powerful is the ability to format a large document in different ways, without having
the source change in any substantial way. This is very useful when I am writing a
paper but I not sure of the conference/journal that the work appear in. Of course
using Word, it is possible to change styles etc. but every time you make a change the
source document gets modified, with all the risks associated with changing a complex,
proprietary file.
I also found when doing my masters dissertation using Word that the file grew to a
huge size (> 30Mbytes) over time. This made it difficult to load, send via email and
generally screwed things up. It also increases the probability that a corruption (due
to a bug in Word for example) will make the document unusable, as happened to me at
least once.
Users of things like Interleaf will understand how very large documents should be
managed as sub documents, and LyX allows me to do this in an intuitive way with proper
cross referencing.
The very large number of bibtex files available make bibliographies easy, and with
things like Pybliographic almost a pleasure. Word of course can use Endnote, but that
suffers from the proprietary file format blight.
Finally, I like the idea that my work will be accessible in its source format in 20 or
30 years time, as long as I have a readable ascii file, I can get to it, I would be
surprised if I could do the same with a Word format document and all the other
proprietary file formats associated with Word/Windoze.
Pete
