On Thursday 28 April 2005 07:13 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
> Steve Litt wrote:
> >On Monday 18 April 2005 02:33 am, Alexander BlÃm wrote:
> >>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.
>
> Lyx is lacking when it comes to customization, but you don't
> 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.


Here's an example. I need a URL style for my book. I want it small, bold and 
underlined. This would be 2 minutes in WordPerfect 5.1 (the wordprocessor 
whose styles I'm most familiar with).

In LyX, I don't have it yet, in spite of trying all the suggestions on the LyX 
list. Herbert's came the closest, but when there were 2 URLs in a row, 
Herbert's solution concatinated them into a single line.

I've spent about 10 hours trying to get a URL style. I can write that off in 
the production of a book, but on a 10,000 word document it would add 20% to 
the authoring time.

By the way, I finally just gave up on the underlining.

SteveT

Steve Litt
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