Steve Litt wrote:
On Monday 18 April 2005 02:33 am, Alexander BlÃm wrote:Lyx is lacking when it comes to customization, but you don't
hello,
I am still a convinced LyX user and I've "infected" a few people around
me to use it aswell. My girlfriend uses it for all kinds of documents
now and gets good grades for homework (the professor likes the the
layout - hehe).
But I've also met a few very stubborn people, like most of my school.
They say that you can solve any problem you're approaching with
WORD2000...
I'm running out of arguments.. They've not even tried LyX and knock it
already. Any good arguments why one should use LyX instead of word?
I think a person should use Word (or in my case OpenOffice) for most stuff. If it's under 10,000 words, LyX is a hassle unless you're willing to accept ALL LyX's defaults.
have to accept "ALL defaults". There is a limited selection of
fonts and sizes for example. There are several pages of other
changeable stuff in the document layout dialog, although other
word processors indeed have much more.
And there are quite a few things that can be achieved by 1-2 simple latex commands in the preamble. Simple stuff that you don't need to learn latex to use - just look it up on the web or the lyx mailing list archives.
Bigger changes are harder - you either learn latex or you
don't do them. Take the trouble of making your own lyx layout
and it can be used for small documents as well as large.
I have found that I don't need to write documents in many very different styles, so taking the trouble once sorted things out for years. So I use lyx for everything except e-mail. From the word documents I see, it seems that people "just use the defaults" when using word too. Word seems to have one particularly nasty looking default - ragged-right text. That's what I see in every word document that comes my way - I believe word can do justified text, but I have yet to see anyone use it.
A reason for not using word is the way word can screw up a document in unexpected ways. Two years in a row, the word users here have managed to _print_ a course catalog where the table of contents listed all content with the same page number througout. (Actually, the first page of TOC was okay, but at some point the page numbers didn't change any more.) Lyx just don't do that sort of thing, so you don't have to look for it while proofreading. Fix a spelling issue or some very minor formatting issue somewhere, and word _may_ scramble the TOC or something else that was fine the last round.
[...]
In summary, my opinion is that you'd have to have rocks in your head to use LyX for a doc under 10,000 words, unless you're willing to accept every default of your document class. However, as the doc surpasses 20,000 words, and certainly 40,000 words, you'd have to have rocks in your head to use Word, or any similar wordProcessor, because LyX does a much better job of creating a uniform document.
Don't forget the common case of "lots and lots of documents with the same style". Each may be less than 10,000 words, but they add up to much more. Spend the time getting that repeated layout right, and lyx rules the small document world as well.
The one thing I wouldn't use lyx for would be "lots of small documents, all styled rather differently", but I don't get that in my work.
Helge Hafting
