I think a person should use Word (or in my case OpenOffice) for most stuff.
Oh, goody. Now we start the Battle of Improperly-Generalized Anecdotes. Here's mine:
> If
it's under 10,000 words, LyX is a hassle unless you're willing to accept ALL LyX's defaults. Here's why...
In WordPerfect 5.1, Word or OpenOffice, modifying a style is a 5 minute procedure. For very sophisticated styles it might take an hour.
I've spent more than an hour trying to coerce Word - without luck - into fixing some glaring formatting error. It's particularly bad about mysteriously deciding to screw with the left indent, in my experience, and particularly prone to trouble when editing a document originally produced by someone else on another system (and so with different customizations applied to "normal.dot", aka Word's Dungeon of Mystery).
> But in LyX,
I've spent 2 days modifying one paragraph style (Environment in LyX speak).
My sympathies, but this hardly defines the LyX experience for everyone, any more than my Word experience does.
Meanwhile, although WordPerfect 5.0 had character styles in May 1988, and Word had styles at least as early as the early 1990's, LyX still does not have character styles (something I keep urging the developers to put in).
Sure, and that's a problem for people who want character styles. There's quite a jump from "don't need character styles" to "willing to accept ALL LyX's defaults", don't you think?
> In
summary, changing the default look of a document class is a HUGE time sink.
I've made a number of changes to the default layout of my dissertation, and the time spent doing that is a negligible fraction of my writing time. And this is the first time I've used LyX or LaTeX (though I admit I'm not new to markup languages in general).
I haven't used LyX for a short document, because all of the short documents I've created since I started using it are HTML, except for a couple that had to be Word due to outside requirements. But I'd have no qualms about using it for one. Certainly *I* find it far less annoying than Word, which as far as I can tell (and I've been using it since the free demo that shipped as a 5 1/2" floppy bound into an issue of _PC Magazine_) is nothing but a nasty collection of ad hoc formatting functions thrown on top of a virtual typewriter.
And there's my anecdote, which I imagine is irrelevant for the vast majority of Word and LyX users. Some people survey the tools available to them, and weigh their advantages and costs; but most use the first one that comes to hand, or the one that their friends use, or the one that seems to offer the path of least resistance, or the one chosen for any number of contingent reasons that have nothing to do with quality.
Marshalling arguments about LyX's superiority, under whatever conditions, isn't going to achieve much, because the operative conditions vary among users (as the difference between Steve's opinion and mine shows), and more importantly because most users aren't interested in those arguments or indeed in the relative merits of available tools. For most users, good enough - even by the slimmest of margins, even with gross compromise - is good enough, and there simply isn't any impetus to change.
Furthermore, most Word users, I believe, want to get some text on a page (whether it's paper or just on screen - I see lots of Word documents that will never be printed). They don't particularly care if it looks good, so long as it looks as if something's been done to it - that they've done due diligence to pretty it up. Separating content and presentation may be elegant and efficient and maintainable, but most Word documents are write-once anyway.
And, of course, there are the realities of document interchange. If you're writing academic articles in the humanities, good luck submitting in anything Word can't digest. Sometimes PDF is an option, but that's still relatively rare. And for students that often applies as well, since professors are increasingly requesting electronic submission of papers, and many of them won't take anything but Word.
-- Michael Wojcik
