Peter Rockett wrote:
Thanks to all who responded to my requests for help to get LyX
working. It's now functioning fine... but tex2lyx has problems
translating my sample file so...
Having looked at Latex stuff a lot over the past few weeks as a Latex
newbie, could I ask a (heretical!?) question? Why isn't LyX (or
something else) a fully fledged WYSIWYG word processor?
Two reasons:
1. WYSIWYG is more work, and LyX is made by volunteers. There aren't always
enough developers. It is better to have a feature in a non-wysiwyg
way, than
not to have it at all. Expect some more wysiwyg in each release as
volunteers
fix such omissions.
2. Some things are _not_ wysiwyg on purpose! Lyx produce very fine output
thanks to the latex backend, doing that in real time is not feasible
with
todays computers and not tomorrows computers either. (Sure, you
can get it for some simple cases, but one can make very time-consuming
latex.)
A strict "what you see is what you get" design tends to result in
"what you
see is _all_ you get". That is, limitations in the user interface
becomes
limitations of the output. Msword has fallen into this trap.
This is why you'll never see lyx break lines on screen _exactly_ the
same way
lines get broken in the output. Latex linebreaking uses complicated
algorithms
that may have to rebreak the entire paragraph when you change a single
letter in the text. This is (still) too slow to do in realtime for
someone typing in the
middle of a big paragraph.
Page breaking and float placement use the same kind of heavy algorithms.
This ensures that a lyx document almost always breaks nicely, so you
don't have to fix a linebreak here and a pagebreak there in a normal
text.
And therefore you rarely need to see the final layout either - you
certainly
don't need that when writing - another distraction removed from the
writing process.
If you really need to see the formatting, use view->dvi or view->pdf
menus.
Lyx instead uses the wysiwym (what you see is what you _mean_) paradigm.
It makes lyx a better fit for book/article writing than any wysiwyg
word processor.
It also makes lyx less fit for writing something where layout
tweaking is
important, such as a greeting card. (Greeting cards are doable of
course, but
cumbersome.)
I can see the logic in how Donald Knuth designed things originally but
I suspect a lot of that was guided by the fact that computers then
were not capable of doing page rendering on the fly. But I don't think
that restriction is true anymore.
It is true still, although there are some trivial cases where true
wysiwyg is possible.
Please note that wysiwyg is complicated by the fact that printers and
screens
have very different resolutions. Try typesetting a 8-column newspaper
wysiwyg
on an ordinary screen - not funny.
So is there any fundamental reason why Yap, say, couldn't be turned
into a word processor... other then the obvious one of the effort
involved? Just wondering because Latex is a significant learning curve
and the tools are really rather rudimentary. WYSIWYG DTP programs exist!
Lyx also aims to be _fast_. Lyx on an ancient computer still let you edit
effortlessly, with snappy writing and scrolling. Try that with those
other DTP
programs. You may have a big computer - some people doesn't. Final output
will be slow of course, but not the writing process!
Helge Hafting
