On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Dotan Cohen wrote:
Is LyX only good for writing books, then?
Nope. I write letters, articles, reports, and presentations using LyX. Of course, I did use it to write my book (using Springer's monograph class) and that's where I really learned LaTeX, too. As I needed the information to do what I or my editor wanted.
I am currently an OOo Writer user. I am always frustrated with styles and I wish that I could just edit the source of the document like I edit HTML. In fact, I have often considered just using HTML but it does not translate well to PDF, and there is no good equations editing capability.
Learn LyX. Back a decade or so ago when I first started, it took me about a half-hour to work through the tutorial. Then I started writing using this tool rather than the word processor. As I came across needs not covered in the tutorial I looked at the two docs under the 'help' menu and, as a last resort, asked on this mail list. Bit-by-bit my knowledge of LaTeX increased and I became much more efficient in my writing. A friend of mine had been writing in plain TeX (probably still is) when I raved about LyX to him as soon as I completed the turorial. He had spent two weeks writing his daughter's resume in plain TeX and asked if I could -- as a complete newcomer -- reproduce the output using LyX. A day later I sent him the results with the .lyx file. He was suitably impressed, but still stuck with plain TeX. (Of course, his OS was Emacs, and he rarely used a GUI except under employer duress.)
I understood from the /. post that LyX would let me work with a document, and edit the source where I see necessary. Is this not so?
Yup. The 'source' is plain text with markup tags.
Although I have invested in learning a bit of PHP, a bit of C, a bit of HTML/CSS, etc, I don't have the resources at the moment to spend more than a few hours learning a new tool. And full LaTeX will take more than a few good hours
Which is why you should work through the LyX tutorial right away. It's not a programming language (although it can be used that way.) There was an interesting blog to which I was referred by my business partner that detailed how a Premier Geek wrote code to control a Martian Lander robot using only TeX. It worked. Rich -- Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | Integrity Credibility Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Innovation <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863
