(Forgot to reply to the full list again. My apologies Helge.) @ Vincent - The installer would be different, and LyX would have to not give error messages for messed-up layout files. See my notes below.
@all - Regarding MicroLyX (tested on Windows) - I recalled that LyX could be run without a LaTeX distro installed, so I tried it. I ran Win XP in my virtualbox and tried installing a light-weight LyX with the current binary installer. Here's how it went: 1. Downloaded the install binary, about 20 Mb, which is fine as far as I'm concerned. 2. Started the installer. I was only asked three things: (a) do I want latex (no), (b) what language should LyX use (English) and (c) what language dictionaries do I want (I chose English). 3. After installing most of what I needed, it downloaded the aspell software and installed it. I thought that Python was required for LyX (it used to be required), but this apparently is no longer the case, which is nice. Overall, the full-LyX installer had no trouble installing a minimal LyX system. Then I tried running LyX. I got an error saying: The layout file requested by this document, article.layout, is not usable. This is probably because the LaTeX class or style file required is not available. See the Customization documentation for more information. LyX will not be able to produce output. Once I clicked out of that, I was able to work within the document just fine. You can only view those document types you can create. Therefore, I was not given the option to view a pdf or postscript version of the document, so I was not able to bother LyX asking it to do something it couldn't do. I did not text image viewing/conversion, but in my experience when you insert an image that LyX does not know how to convert, it automatically displays a message along the lines of "Could not convert this image for display." Conclusion: for windows, installing a stripped-down LyX is easy except that it always complains about the layout file. MicroLyX could easily just be a recompilation of LyX that does not generate those warnings (and uses a different title), accompanied by a separate installer. Any thoughts? David