Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...
I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.
Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.
The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the "semantic
web". Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.
It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing in the humanities that still, it seems to me,
need sorting out at the level of BibTeX styles, and it's going to take
some TeX coding to do that. But I expect again that this will happen, as
more people in the humanities discover the advantages of LyX and LaTeX.
I'm working on one such problem myself already.
Richard Heck
