On Monday 03 January 2005 03:06 pm, Rich Shepard wrote: > Matej, > > Scribus is desktop publishing and is ideal for graphics-heavy layout. > Good for magazines, advertising and the like. Perhaps I'm in the minority, > but I see LyX as a very easy to use front end to LaTeX for the typeset > output of articles, reports, books and similar documents that are > text-heavy.
Rich -- Indeed LyX is a trivially easy front end to LaTeX. Until you need to make your own environments. Creating (as opposed to using) those environments in LyX is every bit as difficult as it is in LaTeX itself. I don't like to fine tune individual pages, but before releasing my books for sale, I like to fine-tune what a warning looks like, what a tip looks like, what a story looks like, what a list looks like, what a chunk of code looks like. Such book-wide fine tuning is trivial in WordPerfect, easy in MS Word, reasonable in OpenOffice, and often hugely inobvious in LyX. I could spend an entire day in Herbert's help pages researching and creating a single environment. I know that's the nature of LaTex, but it would be wonderful if LyX came with something to make environment creation and modification easier. By the way, some book wide things are easier in LyX. When I create a book, I set the page count high enough to justify the price, but as low as possible to minimize shipping costs. A simple adjustment of the document's base font, and slight adjustment of its margins can give me the right page count. I'm writing a book right now, so I'll probably have more to say soon. SteveT
