For some time I have been evaluating Lyx as an academic word processor, but find it wanting in a few critical areas.
For instance, the stated goal of Lyx is to spend more time writing, but less time on formatting. Based on my experience, however, and from posts to this list, a great deal of time is spent inserting LaTeX tags into documents. In fact, my assessment is that more time is spent making Lyx work properly than is spent in dealing with a traditional word-processing environment, be it MS Word or OpenOffice. Moreover, a significant time investment is required to research the format of the tag and where to insert it, and then to debug the results. How does this save time?
Is the eventual goal of Lyx to "GUIfy" more of the LaTeX backend to avoid having to delve into adding tags? Or will this tool remain relatively marginalized, only used by those willing to undertake the significant time overhead needed to actually do productive work?
Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any number of bibliography styles. Most importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more code, yet again, instead of engaging in the writing process.
I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong, because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3) "if you don't like coding, use a different tool."
This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the surface.
-Jeremy
