Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
I tried to create an example with LyX and Word, both showing a layout that has been tweaked quite a bit, using the same font (Palatino) and also mostly the same settings. I tried to make the Word thing as good as possible, otherwise the comparision would not be fair.
Depends on what you want to show. Both programs can produce nice output. (In this case the word file had much more hyphens - bad!)
However, people only want to spend so much time on fixing layout. It is therefore interesting to have two examples where the same amount of time is spent on tweaking both. Something like lyx/word - first draft no editing. Any big differences, who's best? lyx/word - 5min cleaning up each. Any big differences in quality? lyx/word - how much time to make each really good.
http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/Examples/example-lyx.pdf http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/Examples/example-word.pdf
IMO, although the word document might be considered "o.k." at first sight, that the LyX variant looks better. Why? The page "harmony" is better (due to LaTeX page breaking algorithm), the interword spacing is better in general,
page breaking is more intelligent (two orphans in the word file), pdflatex's "font expansion" feature is being used (i.e., the fonts are being expanded/decreased insignificantly in some line to get a better line breaking), and finally: character protuding, i.e., the lines with hyphenation dashes are slightly shifted toward the margin, thus giving the impression of a more "harmonic" margin; actually, LyX did less hyphenations, which might be a result of the paragraph based line breaking algorithm. Then, LyX is doing a better job with different spacings (we have a thin space at "e.g.", normal interword spacing, and a larger space after punctuations (actually, this is also possible with word, but it is seldomly used). And so on.
Note also that the effort to produce such a layout in Word has been significantly higher than in LyX. And I think the real hassle begins when the document has >100 pages.
That last paragraph is very important. "It took a signigicantly higher effort in word." That's a key selling point for lyx. People want nice papers, but don't want to spend the time. With lyx they don't have to.
In practice, many people don't spend time on getting word documents nicer than default either. So you can spot word documents instantly by the ragged right margin, for example. Or the occational heading set with the wrong size. Things lyx users don't need to watch out for, as it is all automatic.
Helge Hafting
