I originally picked up on LyX because I needed to produce some technical manuals quickly that looked good to management and that didn't make me deal with the WYSIWYG nightmares of Word and its ilk.
LyX really came through for me. Now I'm helping a friend apply to graduate school. I used the KOMA-script v. 2 letter class to typeset his letter of intent. Looks good! Now on to the résumé. Let's see what's available. ModernCV looks good, under development for seven years. Except it won't accept last names much longer than the author's name without hyphenation. Searching produces lot's of hacks to deal with this. Run the example that comes with LyX. Note in example says, 'The moderncv class offers lots of customization possibilities; some are explained in the preamble of this document; for more information look at the documentation of the LaTeX-package moderncv.' Yeah, right. The README for moderncv is very short and includes this: 'Until a decent manual is written, you can always look in the "examples" directory for some examples. Documents can be compiled into dvi, ps or pdf.' The example LyX file points to documentation that doesn't actually exist. There is no 'more information'. Nothing is explained. Seven years of development and there's nothing that Aunt Tillie can use. I know what I'm going to hear, 'Do it yourself', 'That's how open source works'. I agree. Perhaps I'll find the time to work on the documentation. In the meantime, I need to produce a document NOW, not work on the documentation for the tool to produce the document. Lesson: Please don't point to ghost documentation. If you have the time to produce something that you expect people to use, you need to make the time to explain how to use it. (Disclaimer: this doesn't apply to LyX itself, which is richly documented. Just to accessories to LyX and to open source generally.) -- Rich
