On Sunday 08 July 2007 13:04, Michael Anderson wrote: > Call me silly, but I thought that the point of LaTeX was to remove > the author from this kind of formatting and leave that up to the > pro's. I don't think that it would be wise to enable just anyone to > crank out a sty file or layout without understanding the underlying > architecture of the LyX and LaTeX systems and the reasoning why > things are the way they are. I don't think that giving someone with > minimal experience in the subject the ability to dabble in typography > is really good idea. Even LyX requires this kind of implicit > understanding of LaTeX to do all but the simplest of projects. I > don't know about the reset of the community, but before I let LyX do > anything I make sure that I understand the actual LaTeX code that it > is generating and how to do the same thing long hand in a LaTeX > editor before I trust what is going on. I just don't feel that > something as critical as styles and layouts should be relegated to > the same "black box" status as they are in Word. If people want to > make styles and layouts then they should be required to put in the > work to learn to do it right and why things are done the way they are > by the pro's. > > Mike
Hi Mike, You're advocating the idea of separation of authorship from typesetting. I'm advocating both done by one person. That's probably because I'm a self-publisher. I'd like to take LyX to the masses for the simplest possible reason -- the alternatives for the masses are bleak. MS Word's vendor lockin, enablement of massive fine tuning, unavailability on Linux, and wierd native format make it, IMHO, unsuitable. OpenOffice's style capabilities, are, in my opinion, insufficient for writing a decent document. Emacs plus docbook and LaTeX are "author writes tags" environments which, to me, ruin the authoring experience, even if I am smart and knowledeable enough to use them. To me, in every respect except style creation and modification, LyX is a better word processor than the supposed word processors. This in no way reduces its utility as a typesetting tool, it is simply yet another (major) niche that needs filling, and LyX is just the product to fill it. LyX can fill it with ABSOLUTELY NO further modification -- the style creator I suggest is a separate product not needed for LyX. I first came up with this when we had a discussion of OpenOffice on my LUG mailing list, and I was forced to state my opinion that OpenOffice writer is junk (sorry, but that's my opinion). Naturally, MS Word can't be used on Linux, and even if it could, it's not a particularly good product. So I thought -- how can LyX be brought to the masses, and came up with the template driven style maker. SteveT Steve Litt Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware http://www.troubleshooters.com/
