Jeremy Wells wrote:
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.
It certainly seems like that, when reading this list. For inserting latex
tags is the one operation that people really need help with.
The many people who just write and don't use latex tags, don't post much
questions either.
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?
You write lots of documents, all with different and very specific layout
needs?
Then you might need a writing tool more oriented towards layout tweaking.
Lyx may not be the tool if every new document needs a radically different
layout.
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?
Supporting more of latex is indeed one goal. But don't expect GUI
support for everything that is possible to do in latex - that isn't doable.
GUI support for more of what writers usually need, (and which have a
straightforward graphical representation) will happen as developers
have time for it.
Note that many people are productive using lyx. Either because they
don't need to tweak the built-in document classes, or because
they are done with their extensive tweaks, and now produce document
after document using their finished custom layout.
Helge Hafting
