Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Helge Hafting]

Steve Litt wrote:

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
  

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.



I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert 
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.


  

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.



That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a 
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because 
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is 
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need 
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that 
significant

Sure, a book is big enough that you can justify spending quite some
time perfecting a custom layout.  After a while you get good at
it too, so it don't take so much time. A good thing with lyx is
that once you have perfected the layout, you can write another
chapter without any more tweaking. :-)

I can only guess that Jeremy writes shorter documents than your books,
all with different styles, seeing how he complains that layout tweaking
takes more time with lyx than other word processors.

Helge Hafting

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Helge Hafting]

Steve Litt wrote:

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
  

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.



I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert 
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.


  

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.



That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a 
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because 
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is 
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need 
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that 
significant

Sure, a book is big enough that you can justify spending quite some
time perfecting a custom layout.  After a while you get good at
it too, so it don't take so much time. A good thing with lyx is
that once you have perfected the layout, you can write another
chapter without any more tweaking. :-)

I can only guess that Jeremy writes shorter documents than your books,
all with different styles, seeing how he complains that layout tweaking
takes more time with lyx than other word processors.

Helge Hafting

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Helge Hafting]

Steve Litt wrote:

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
  

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.



I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert 
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.


  

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.



That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a 
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because 
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is 
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need 
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that 
significant

Sure, a book is big enough that you can justify spending quite some
time perfecting a custom layout.  After a while you get good at
it too, so it don't take so much time. A good thing with lyx is
that once you have perfected the layout, you can write another
chapter without any more tweaking. :-)

I can only guess that Jeremy writes shorter documents than your books,
all with different styles, seeing how he complains that layout tweaking
takes more time with lyx than other word processors.

Helge Hafting

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Helge Hafting]

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

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jean-Marc Lasgouttes]

 Rich == Rich Shepard [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

Rich   I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis
Rich and \ldots. :-)

How did you come up with these \textellipsis, then? InsertSp. CharsEllipsis
uses \ldots.

JMarc

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Steve Litt]

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
 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.

I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert 
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.


  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.

That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a 
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because 
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is 
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need 
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that 
significant?

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
Author: 
   * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware
   * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist
   * Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting
   * Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
   * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist

http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore
http://www.troubleshooters.com/utp/tcourses.htm

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Helge Hafting]

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

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jean-Marc Lasgouttes]

 Rich == Rich Shepard [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

Rich   I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis
Rich and \ldots. :-)

How did you come up with these \textellipsis, then? InsertSp. CharsEllipsis
uses \ldots.

JMarc

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Steve Litt]

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
 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.

I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert 
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.


  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.

That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a 
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because 
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is 
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need 
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that 
significant?

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
Author: 
   * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware
   * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist
   * Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting
   * Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
   * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist

http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore
http://www.troubleshooters.com/utp/tcourses.htm

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Helge Hafting]

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

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jean-Marc Lasgouttes]

> "Rich" == Rich Shepard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Rich>   I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis
Rich> and \ldots. :-)

How did you come up with these \textellipsis, then? Insert>Sp. Chars>Ellipsis
uses \ldots.

JMarc

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Steve Litt]

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:22 am, Helge Hafting wrote:
> 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.

I think what most people need help with is creating layouts. Few people insert 
LaTeX inline into the document. There's a reason it's called EVIL Red Text.

>
> > 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.

That isn't how it works for me. For me, LyX is good even if every book has a 
different layout file. Every one of my books has a different layout, because 
every one has a slightly different intended audience. Yet, every document is 
consistent *within itself*. If it takes 3 months to write a book and you need 
to spend 1 solid week making the layout, is that one week really all that 
significant?

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
Author: 
   * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware
   * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist
   * Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting
   * Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
   * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist

http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore
http://www.troubleshooters.com/utp/tcourses.htm

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Eric Nystrom wrote:

 We humanists have particular expertise with
 documentation - perhaps creating, revising, or tweaking the docs may be of
 help.  In short, please appreciate this community both for what it is and
 what it is not; and if you are looking to contribute, there are many ways
 of doing so.

ACK. Though it is not impossible even for humanists to a bit of coding, if
desired.
I am a humanist myself and I never saw (let alone wrote) a single line of
code before I encountered that even if the developers are very open, I had
to make my own hands dirty to get some of my desired features in. Remember
that people are running this project in their spare time, and they are,
understandably enough, particularly interested in features they need
themselves (or they find interesting from a coder's point of view, to
practice their coding).

For instance: jurabib (since this is mentioned by the OP). I implemented
that to Lyx 1.4 because I need it for my own work. I admit that the jurabib
support still can be enhanced in many ways. But hey, it's a brand new
feature, jurabib itself is very feature-rich, and I also have to get some
real work done. Jurabib support *will* evolve, if people tell us what and
why they need a given feature (and not: I want *all* jurabib features
pronto).

I encountered that the LyX code is (more and more) well documented and
understandable. All I know about C++ is actually from staring at that code
and from the patch reviewing of the developers (and I think there are other
developers with similar experiences).

In general, I think that LyX will only evolve for certain topics if people
from that topic are willing to participate in one way or the other, simply
because they best know their needs.

I understand that writing a thesis comes first and doesn't give you too much
time to invest at that particular moment. I also understand the frustration
if an application doesn't seem to do what you actually (and urgently) need.
But vice versa, you should also understand that developers might not get
too motivated if a user simply argues Why the hell does this [free]
application not do what I want it to do? I need to save my time, so sit
down, invest your spare time and do that for me!

Regards,
Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Charles de Miramon]

Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:


 For instance: jurabib (since this is mentioned by the OP). I implemented
 that to Lyx 1.4 because I need it for my own work. I admit that the
 jurabib support still can be enhanced in many ways. But hey, it's a brand
 new feature, jurabib itself is very feature-rich, and I also have to get
 some real work done. Jurabib support *will* evolve, if people tell us what
 and why they need a given feature (and not: I want *all* jurabib features
 pronto).
 

A \nobibliography{} option would be nice for 1.4.3. Today, it is really a
fragile hack to do it inside LyX

Cheers,
Charles
-- 
http://www.kde-france.org

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Charles de Miramon wrote:

 A \nobibliography{} option would be nice for 1.4.3. Today, it is really a
 fragile hack to do it inside LyX

Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 10:56, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
 Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.

  Would that change the file format?

 Jürgen

PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)
-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jose' Matos wrote:

 Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.
 
 Would that change the file format?

Yes.

 Jürgen
 
 PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)

I see lots of policemen recently ;-)

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 11:28, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
 Jose' Matos wrote:
  Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.
 
  Would that change the file format?

 Yes.

  I was afraid to hear that. You know the rules, this change can only go in 
1.5svn. :-(

  Jürgen
 
  PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)

 I see lots of policemen recently ;-)

  What would you expect with the World Cup in your country? ;-)

 Jürgen

-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jose' Matos wrote:

 I was afraid to hear that. You know the rules, this change can only go in
 1.5svn. :-(

I know.

 I see lots of policemen recently ;-)
 
 What would you expect with the World Cup in your country? ;-)

exactly. People are quite excited ATM (though I'm not living in one of
the FIFA occupied cities). But do I have to tell that to a Portuguese?

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 12:02, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
 exactly. People are quite excited ATM (though I'm not living in one of
 the FIFA occupied cities). But do I have to tell that to a Portuguese?

  For us, two years ago - Euro 2004, it was UEFA. :-)

 Jürgen

-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Sam Russell]

On 19/06/06, Jeremy Wells [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

For some time I have been evaluating Lyx as an academic word processor, but 
find it wanting in a few critical areas.
Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and bibliographies 
are a major issue. There is no easy to use
method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any 
number of bibliography styles. Most
importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more code, 
yet again, instead of engaging in the
writing process.


Yes.  Especially for the Humanities where Journal X or Department Y
has its own house style.


I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong, because...; 
2) wait x number of years and we'll
be there; or 3) if you don't like coding, use a different tool.


1) No you're wrong.  LyX is a front end, designed to make LaTeX
easier, which it has successed at.  Its suffering from mission-shift
at the moment as more people take it up.  Due to the sciences bias in
the initial user group / development group, LyX and LaTeX achieve
science results with greater ease.  I anticipate this will change as
more humanities users take LyX/LaTeX up.

2) Wait x number of years and we'll be closer to a front-end for more
LaTeX features.  Though this may mean tkJuraBibStyleEditor as a device
independent GUI ap, rather than the features embedded in LyX itself.
Or it may mean tkLyX_Semi_WYSIWYM/WYSIWYG_StyleEditor instead of a
style editor within LyX itself.  Or it may mean
LyX_DocumentTemplate_Humanities_History_ChicagoFootnotes_UniversityFoo_DeptBar_StyleBok
etc.  Who knows?  It depends on the contributions from the community
of users and developers between now and year X.

What I do know is the age, stability and support for LyX/LaTeX/TeX
means that your commitment is unlikely to be wasted by technological
or commercial change: Company X won't fail and no longer support their
document format.

3) If you don't like the limitations of LyX as it currently is, and
don't like the bug/feature resolution system of ERT / feature
requesting / solving it yourself and sharing the results, don't use
LyX.  The community development culture is unlikely to change.


This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise that 
the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's
awfully rough beneath the surface.


Yes.  I found that LyX was great to write undergraduate / honours work
in without a bibliography / citation manager.  Now that I'm working on
journal articles and my doctoral dissertation, I'm finding that I'm
coming up against new challenges with regards to citation management.
1.4.3 provides far more suitable and easy solutions than 1.3.7 did for
me.  It also took a large amount of time to find the right device
independent tools for bibliography management, and the ones which
suited my academic needs over a career.  I found this a more useful
investment of my time than the repeated wordprocessor crashes and
frustrations of EndNote.  Your situation may differ.

Finally, LyX development works more like a community of knowledge than
a commercial developer.  People produce new ideas, or reproduce old
ideas, and share them for free.  The cost is of course, people may not
have developed the ideas you need, yet.

yours,
Sam R.
--
I will give you Tacos, such Tacos as you have never seen.

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Eric Nystrom wrote:

 We humanists have particular expertise with
 documentation - perhaps creating, revising, or tweaking the docs may be of
 help.  In short, please appreciate this community both for what it is and
 what it is not; and if you are looking to contribute, there are many ways
 of doing so.

ACK. Though it is not impossible even for humanists to a bit of coding, if
desired.
I am a humanist myself and I never saw (let alone wrote) a single line of
code before I encountered that even if the developers are very open, I had
to make my own hands dirty to get some of my desired features in. Remember
that people are running this project in their spare time, and they are,
understandably enough, particularly interested in features they need
themselves (or they find interesting from a coder's point of view, to
practice their coding).

For instance: jurabib (since this is mentioned by the OP). I implemented
that to Lyx 1.4 because I need it for my own work. I admit that the jurabib
support still can be enhanced in many ways. But hey, it's a brand new
feature, jurabib itself is very feature-rich, and I also have to get some
real work done. Jurabib support *will* evolve, if people tell us what and
why they need a given feature (and not: I want *all* jurabib features
pronto).

I encountered that the LyX code is (more and more) well documented and
understandable. All I know about C++ is actually from staring at that code
and from the patch reviewing of the developers (and I think there are other
developers with similar experiences).

In general, I think that LyX will only evolve for certain topics if people
from that topic are willing to participate in one way or the other, simply
because they best know their needs.

I understand that writing a thesis comes first and doesn't give you too much
time to invest at that particular moment. I also understand the frustration
if an application doesn't seem to do what you actually (and urgently) need.
But vice versa, you should also understand that developers might not get
too motivated if a user simply argues Why the hell does this [free]
application not do what I want it to do? I need to save my time, so sit
down, invest your spare time and do that for me!

Regards,
Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Charles de Miramon]

Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:


 For instance: jurabib (since this is mentioned by the OP). I implemented
 that to Lyx 1.4 because I need it for my own work. I admit that the
 jurabib support still can be enhanced in many ways. But hey, it's a brand
 new feature, jurabib itself is very feature-rich, and I also have to get
 some real work done. Jurabib support *will* evolve, if people tell us what
 and why they need a given feature (and not: I want *all* jurabib features
 pronto).
 

A \nobibliography{} option would be nice for 1.4.3. Today, it is really a
fragile hack to do it inside LyX

Cheers,
Charles
-- 
http://www.kde-france.org

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Charles de Miramon wrote:

 A \nobibliography{} option would be nice for 1.4.3. Today, it is really a
 fragile hack to do it inside LyX

Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 10:56, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
 Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.

  Would that change the file format?

 Jürgen

PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)
-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jose' Matos wrote:

 Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.
 
 Would that change the file format?

Yes.

 Jürgen
 
 PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)

I see lots of policemen recently ;-)

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 11:28, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
 Jose' Matos wrote:
  Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.
 
  Would that change the file format?

 Yes.

  I was afraid to hear that. You know the rules, this change can only go in 
1.5svn. :-(

  Jürgen
 
  PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)

 I see lots of policemen recently ;-)

  What would you expect with the World Cup in your country? ;-)

 Jürgen

-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jose' Matos wrote:

 I was afraid to hear that. You know the rules, this change can only go in
 1.5svn. :-(

I know.

 I see lots of policemen recently ;-)
 
 What would you expect with the World Cup in your country? ;-)

exactly. People are quite excited ATM (though I'm not living in one of
the FIFA occupied cities). But do I have to tell that to a Portuguese?

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 12:02, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
 exactly. People are quite excited ATM (though I'm not living in one of
 the FIFA occupied cities). But do I have to tell that to a Portuguese?

  For us, two years ago - Euro 2004, it was UEFA. :-)

 Jürgen

-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Sam Russell]

On 19/06/06, Jeremy Wells [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

For some time I have been evaluating Lyx as an academic word processor, but 
find it wanting in a few critical areas.
Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and bibliographies 
are a major issue. There is no easy to use
method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any 
number of bibliography styles. Most
importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more code, 
yet again, instead of engaging in the
writing process.


Yes.  Especially for the Humanities where Journal X or Department Y
has its own house style.


I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong, because...; 
2) wait x number of years and we'll
be there; or 3) if you don't like coding, use a different tool.


1) No you're wrong.  LyX is a front end, designed to make LaTeX
easier, which it has successed at.  Its suffering from mission-shift
at the moment as more people take it up.  Due to the sciences bias in
the initial user group / development group, LyX and LaTeX achieve
science results with greater ease.  I anticipate this will change as
more humanities users take LyX/LaTeX up.

2) Wait x number of years and we'll be closer to a front-end for more
LaTeX features.  Though this may mean tkJuraBibStyleEditor as a device
independent GUI ap, rather than the features embedded in LyX itself.
Or it may mean tkLyX_Semi_WYSIWYM/WYSIWYG_StyleEditor instead of a
style editor within LyX itself.  Or it may mean
LyX_DocumentTemplate_Humanities_History_ChicagoFootnotes_UniversityFoo_DeptBar_StyleBok
etc.  Who knows?  It depends on the contributions from the community
of users and developers between now and year X.

What I do know is the age, stability and support for LyX/LaTeX/TeX
means that your commitment is unlikely to be wasted by technological
or commercial change: Company X won't fail and no longer support their
document format.

3) If you don't like the limitations of LyX as it currently is, and
don't like the bug/feature resolution system of ERT / feature
requesting / solving it yourself and sharing the results, don't use
LyX.  The community development culture is unlikely to change.


This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise that 
the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's
awfully rough beneath the surface.


Yes.  I found that LyX was great to write undergraduate / honours work
in without a bibliography / citation manager.  Now that I'm working on
journal articles and my doctoral dissertation, I'm finding that I'm
coming up against new challenges with regards to citation management.
1.4.3 provides far more suitable and easy solutions than 1.3.7 did for
me.  It also took a large amount of time to find the right device
independent tools for bibliography management, and the ones which
suited my academic needs over a career.  I found this a more useful
investment of my time than the repeated wordprocessor crashes and
frustrations of EndNote.  Your situation may differ.

Finally, LyX development works more like a community of knowledge than
a commercial developer.  People produce new ideas, or reproduce old
ideas, and share them for free.  The cost is of course, people may not
have developed the ideas you need, yet.

yours,
Sam R.
--
I will give you Tacos, such Tacos as you have never seen.

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Eric Nystrom wrote:

> We humanists have particular expertise with
> documentation - perhaps creating, revising, or tweaking the docs may be of
> help.  In short, please appreciate this community both for what it is and
> what it is not; and if you are looking to contribute, there are many ways
> of doing so.

ACK. Though it is not impossible even for humanists to a bit of coding, if
desired.
I am a humanist myself and I never saw (let alone wrote) a single line of
code before I encountered that even if the developers are very open, I had
to make my own hands dirty to get some of my desired features in. Remember
that people are running this project in their spare time, and they are,
understandably enough, particularly interested in features they need
themselves (or they find interesting from a coder's point of view, to
practice their coding).

For instance: jurabib (since this is mentioned by the OP). I implemented
that to Lyx 1.4 because I need it for my own work. I admit that the jurabib
support still can be enhanced in many ways. But hey, it's a brand new
feature, jurabib itself is very feature-rich, and I also have to get some
real work done. Jurabib support *will* evolve, if people tell us what and
why they need a given feature (and not: "I want *all* jurabib features
pronto").

I encountered that the LyX code is (more and more) well documented and
understandable. All I know about C++ is actually from staring at that code
and from the patch reviewing of the developers (and I think there are other
developers with similar experiences).

In general, I think that LyX will only evolve for certain topics if people
from that topic are willing to participate in one way or the other, simply
because they best know their needs.

I understand that writing a thesis comes first and doesn't give you too much
time to invest at that particular moment. I also understand the frustration
if an application doesn't seem to do what you actually (and urgently) need.
But vice versa, you should also understand that developers might not get
too motivated if a user simply argues "Why the hell does this [free]
application not do what I want it to do? I need to save my time, so sit
down, invest your spare time and do that for me!"

Regards,
Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Charles de Miramon]

Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:


> For instance: jurabib (since this is mentioned by the OP). I implemented
> that to Lyx 1.4 because I need it for my own work. I admit that the
> jurabib support still can be enhanced in many ways. But hey, it's a brand
> new feature, jurabib itself is very feature-rich, and I also have to get
> some real work done. Jurabib support *will* evolve, if people tell us what
> and why they need a given feature (and not: "I want *all* jurabib features
> pronto").
> 

A \nobibliography{} option would be nice for 1.4.3. Today, it is really a
fragile hack to do it inside LyX

Cheers,
Charles
-- 
http://www.kde-france.org

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Charles de Miramon wrote:

> A \nobibliography{} option would be nice for 1.4.3. Today, it is really a
> fragile hack to do it inside LyX

Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 10:56, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
> Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.

  Would that change the file format?

> Jürgen

PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)
-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jose' Matos wrote:

>> Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.
> 
> Would that change the file format?

Yes.

>> Jürgen
> 
> PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)

I see lots of policemen recently ;-)

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 11:28, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
> Jose' Matos wrote:
> >> Please add it to bugzilla, if not already done.
> >
> > Would that change the file format?
>
> Yes.

  I was afraid to hear that. You know the rules, this change can only go in 
1.5svn. :-(

> >> Jürgen
> >
> > PS: Wearing my hat of file format police. ;-)
>
> I see lots of policemen recently ;-)

  What would you expect with the World Cup in your country? ;-)

> Jürgen

-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jose' Matos wrote:

> I was afraid to hear that. You know the rules, this change can only go in
> 1.5svn. :-(

I know.

>> I see lots of policemen recently ;-)
> 
> What would you expect with the World Cup in your country? ;-)

exactly. People are quite excited ATM (though I'm not living in one of
the "FIFA occupied cities"). But do I have to tell that to a Portuguese?

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Jose' Matos]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 12:02, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
> exactly. People are quite excited ATM (though I'm not living in one of
> the "FIFA occupied cities"). But do I have to tell that to a Portuguese?

  For us, two years ago - Euro 2004, it was UEFA. :-)

> Jürgen

-- 
José Abílio

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Sam Russell]

On 19/06/06, Jeremy Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

For some time I have been evaluating Lyx as an academic word processor, but 
find it wanting in a few critical areas.
Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and bibliographies 
are a major issue. There is no easy to use
method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any 
number of bibliography styles. Most
importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more code, 
yet again, instead of engaging in the
writing process.


Yes.  Especially for the Humanities where Journal X or Department Y
has its own house style.


I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong, because..."; 
2) "wait x number of years and we'll
be there"; or 3) "if you don't like coding, use a different tool."


1) No you're wrong.  LyX is a front end, designed to make LaTeX
easier, which it has successed at.  Its suffering from mission-shift
at the moment as more people take it up.  Due to the sciences bias in
the initial user group / development group, LyX and LaTeX achieve
science results with greater ease.  I anticipate this will change as
more humanities users take LyX/LaTeX up.

2) Wait x number of years and we'll be closer to a front-end for more
LaTeX features.  Though this may mean tkJuraBibStyleEditor as a device
independent GUI ap, rather than the features embedded in LyX itself.
Or it may mean tkLyX_Semi_WYSIWYM/WYSIWYG_StyleEditor instead of a
style editor within LyX itself.  Or it may mean
LyX_DocumentTemplate_Humanities_History_ChicagoFootnotes_UniversityFoo_DeptBar_StyleBok
etc.  Who knows?  It depends on the contributions from the community
of users and developers between now and year X.

What I do know is the age, stability and support for LyX/LaTeX/TeX
means that your commitment is unlikely to be wasted by technological
or commercial change: Company X won't fail and no longer support their
document format.

3) If you don't like the limitations of LyX as it currently is, and
don't like the bug/feature resolution system of ERT / feature
requesting / solving it yourself and sharing the results, don't use
LyX.  The community development culture is unlikely to change.


This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise that 
the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's
awfully rough beneath the surface.


Yes.  I found that LyX was great to write undergraduate / honours work
in without a bibliography / citation manager.  Now that I'm working on
journal articles and my doctoral dissertation, I'm finding that I'm
coming up against new challenges with regards to citation management.
1.4.3 provides far more suitable and easy solutions than 1.3.7 did for
me.  It also took a large amount of time to find the right device
independent tools for bibliography management, and the ones which
suited my academic needs over a career.  I found this a more useful
investment of my time than the repeated wordprocessor crashes and
frustrations of EndNote.  Your situation may differ.

Finally, LyX development works more like a community of knowledge than
a commercial developer.  People produce new ideas, or reproduce old
ideas, and share them for free.  The cost is of course, people may not
have developed the ideas you need, yet.

yours,
Sam R.
--
I will give you Tacos, such Tacos as you have never seen.

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if you
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

No:
4) Sit down, learn coding and implement the features you are missing. Or at 
least: 5) write down your enhancement wishes clearly and try to convince some 
kind soul to implement it for you.

This is an open source project, not a company where you can complain to.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Richard Heck]

Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...

I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.

Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.

The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the semantic
web. Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.

It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing in the humanities that 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Jeremy Wells wrote:


I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong, 
because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if 
you don't like coding, use a different tool.


1) You're wrong somewhat...

People in this list are really advanced user. I've been using LyX for 
more than ten years and didn't need to do any tweaking. Try it, the 
default looking of the generated documents is very fine already (above 
anything that Word or OpenOffice can produce, especially if you use math.)


As for citation you can just use the included citation support, no need 
to use natbib or jurabib for simple citation. Actually this simple 
citation support is already much more advanced and useful than MS Word 
reference feature.


Abdel.

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 19 June 2006 09:21 am, 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. 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?

Hi Jeremy,

I feel your pain. I'd dump LyX in a minute if it didn't produce such darned 
good, perfectly typeset output, and if it weren't so easy to slam out content 
with LyX.

Note I said it was easy to *slam out content*, not to make or modify 
environments (paragraph styles). In my estimation, creating a new style is 
between 5 and 50 times harder with LyX than it would be with Wordperfect or 
MS Word, and between 2 and 20 times harder than with Openoffice. It's 
frustrating.

What I recommend you do is this... As you write and discover that you need a 
new environment (paragraph style), go into your layout file and make the 
environment, but just make it bare bones so you can use it in the document. 
Then, on occasion, take off your content authoring hat and put on your 
LyX/LaTeX expert hat, and make all your new bare bones paragraph styles 
exactly what you want. That's what I tend to do. Fully coding each 
environment as it comes up makes you forget the stream of thought of your 
content.

As a rule, I don't see LyX as a timesaver when compared to wordprocessors. I 
see it simply as something that produces more pleasing and more professional 
output.


 Is the eventual goal of Lyx to GUIfy more of the LaTeX backend to avoid
 having to delve into adding tags? 

I think LyX has already GUIfied LaTeX, and in doing so made the actual 
authoring of content (as opposed to creating or modifying styles) very fast.

 Or will this tool remain relatively 
 marginalized, only used by those willing to undertake the significant time
 overhead needed to actually do productive work?

That's a loaded question. Consider the author whose boss or company hands him 
a fully functional LyX layout file, telling him only to use the styles 
contained therein. Such an author will find LyX trivially easy, and will brag 
to the heavens about how quick, easy and high quality LyX is. The same is 
true for the author who is satisfied with his document class's default 
styles, and I've known many such people.

It's only people like you and me (and many others on this list) who need their 
documents to look different from the document class defaults, or who need 
additional envrionments, who would consider LyX difficult.


 Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and
 bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use method (e.g., a
 GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any number of
 bibliography styles. Most importantly, customizing these styles again
 requires one to write more code, yet again, instead of engaging in the
 writing process.

 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if you
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

You're not wrong, but as I mention, LyX isn't as hard as you think either.

In my opinion, the day LyX finds a way to reread a document's layout files 
without closing and reopening the document or requiring the user to request 
Edit-Reconfigure, LyX environment and layout creation/modification will 
become MUCH easier, as modify/compile/test cycles go from 1 minute and almost 
10 mouse clicks to as little as one keypress of Ctrl+T, which compiles to 
postscript, and if you're in debug mode or coding mode or whatever they call 
the mode that would eliminate Edit-Configure and restarting the session.


 This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise
 that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the
 surface.

LaTeX is powerful and produces beautiful output, but that comes at the price 
of ease. LaTeX isn't easy. I had to buy a book and become familiar with LaTeX 
before LyX stopped being painful. When I write letters, or documents less 
than 20 pages, I use Openoffice. But I author and sell books, and the output 
of LyX is so good that in my opinion my books can't be discerned from those 
of a major publisher if it weren't for my self-designed covers and my staple 
binding method.

Like I say, I feel your pain. All I can tell you is that right now I'm 
authoring my third LyX created book. You might find some of my LyX writings 
helpful, because they were made in the same mindstate 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[David Neeley]

Jeremy et al.:

I am a relatively new LyX user, too. Among the documents I did in the
first days of using it was a 12-page, footnoted report. It was far
simpler than using a word processor be it OOo, Word, WordPerfect,
WordPro, KWord, AbiWord, or various others with which I am quite
familiar.

(I should add, I suppose, that I have worked as a corporate writer for
a very long time now, including several stints as a technical writer).

In my view, so long as what you are doing fits within the most common
uses, LyX is easy to use and the output is unmatched. However, I do
wish there were an easier environment in which to create new layout
files. Especially for those new to LyX/LaTeX, this is perhaps the
largest single stumbling block.

I am a firm believer in creating styles and using them rather than
overriding particular pieces of a document--to the fullest possible
extent. That makes upkeep of that document over time a much more
consistent effort with much less effort involved. It also makes
repurposing the document for other formats simpler as well.

It may be easy for those experienced in using LaTeX commands to
alter a given style file--but when the alteration is something that is
to be used repetitively, it is far superior IMHO to create a new style
to handle the variation...but that is something that is now quite
difficult.

David

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Eric Nystrom]

Jeremy,

I'm a humanities user as well (history) so I understand your frustration
however, I'll take an approach most similar to your #1 -- you're wrong:
Lyx requires a little more investment in document structures, formatting,
and so on, which is the point of most of the discussion on the list.
However, once you get it set up correctly, you can leave it alone and
everything works well, almost all of the time.  I'm currently writing my
diss (with jurabib and Jabref) and if I compile my document now, of course
the bibliographic citations in the footnotes aren't exactly how I want
them.  I know that at some point I'll take a couple of hours, spread over a
couple of days, to RTFMs, search the list archives and wiki, and even ask a
question or two on the relevant list.  I'll get the answers I need, then
make a couple changes, and everything will work right.  As long as I stay in
my field, I'll probably never need to ask those questions again.  Over the
long run, this is a great investment of my time.  (This is, of course, a
recapitulation in micro of the overall philosophy of LyX - concentrate on
the writing, which computers do not do well, and leave the typesetting and
formatting to the machine.)

The other thing is that many of us use LyX because we think it's a superior
solution for our needs, of course, but also because we like the helpful
community here.  It's a place where people communicate with respect toward
each other, and contribute when it's possible to do so.  The willingness to
pitch in and make things work -- either for yourself or for everyone else as
well -- is a key part of this community.  Not all of us, including me, have
the time or inclination to learn how to code, but I deeply appreciate those
who do.  So -- how can people like us help?  Wide-ranging criticism is not
the best answer.  Detailed requests -- i can make it do X by placing this
ERT in each footnote, but could we perhaps have a button or macro to handle
that automatically? are more helpful to the developers. When we figure out
how to solve a problem that vexes us, we can post our solution to the list
or the wiki, to make it part of the public record.  (I'm quite grateful to
the multiple participants in the Convert to Word discussions of a while
ago, for example.)  We humanists have particular expertise with
documentation - perhaps creating, revising, or tweaking the docs may be of
help.  In short, please appreciate this community both for what it is and
what it is not; and if you are looking to contribute, there are many ways of
doing so.

Best regards,

-Eric

On 6/19/06, Juergen Spitzmueller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if
you
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

No:
4) Sit down, learn coding and implement the features you are missing. Or
at
least: 5) write down your enhancement wishes clearly and try to convince
some
kind soul to implement it for you.

This is an open source project, not a company where you can complain to.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Martin A. Hansen]

hello jeremy


i agree with you on your observations.

i find lyx a very nice editor for formatting documents, however, i also have
this feeling that most of my time is spend on the steep learning slopes of
latex (which is because all the lyx things are fast and easy!).

in my humble oppinion, latex is complicated - perhaps too complicated and
clearly the time robber for all of us?!?

so i would like to add to your post some questions about considering
alternatives to latex as layout engine. would it be possible (and feasible)
to integrate tex commands with lyx circumnavigating latex? what other
alternatives are there? xhtml and css may generate hi-end typographic
output, yes? (i guess that is why google bought writely ...).


- finally a constructive suggestion. how about a bibliographic tool within
lyx to replace makebst with some WYSIWYG ?

sincerely,


martin

On 6/19/06, Jeremy Wells [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. 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?

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?

Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and
bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use
method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or
any number of bibliography styles. Most
importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more
code, yet again, instead of engaging in the
writing process.

I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll
be there; or 3) if you don't like coding, use a different tool.

This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise
that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's
awfully rough beneath the surface.

-Jeremy

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, David Neeley wrote:


I am a firm believer in creating styles and using them rather than
overriding particular pieces of a document--to the fullest possible extent.
That makes upkeep of that document over time a much more consistent effort
with much less effort involved. It also makes repurposing the document for
other formats simpler as well.


David,

  If you cannot easily adjust an existing style (including Memoir and KOMA),
but it's important for you to have something custom-built for your needs or
those of your company, why not hire one of the LyX developers to create it for
you to your specifications?

  It may not be the case that the majority of users need -- even want -- to
create new styles. I'm not a graphic artist or page layout expert, so I'm
grateful that those who have those skills have designed layouts and typefaces
that are elegant and communicate easily and well. And I just use them, happy
that I don't have to concern myself with these details.

  We take our vehicles to a professional mechanic when we don't have the
skills or time to learn how to do it ourselves, Our economies are filled with
specialists, and we have the option of investing the time and effort learning
how to something complex ourselves or hiring those who already know how to do
it. Open source applications (such as LyX) are created, maintained, and
improved by volunteers, in their spare time. It's not unreasonable to hire
them for custom work.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Stephen Harris]

Richard Heck wrote:

Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...

I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.

Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.

The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the semantic
web. Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.

It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Richard Heck wrote:


I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.)


Richard,

  When I worked for others in the corporate world, I found that the PHBs were
the worst on this. They'd obsess about format (why can't you put the org
chart block on the other side?) than the content. This is probably still the
case, as seen in Dilbert each day.


Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway.


  I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to publish my
book, they provided their own class (svmono) for monographs, and they have a
TeXpert on staff in New York because they prefer to get documents submitted
camera ready. Well, when the TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for
consistency with their standards, he asked me to replace all instances of
\textellipsis with \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of
TLC2, and discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of following
punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all that minutiae, so I
shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a global search and replace,
and was done.

  I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis and \ldots.
:-)

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Martin A. Hansen wrote:


so i would like to add to your post some questions about considering
alternatives to latex as layout engine. would it be possible (and feasible)
to integrate tex commands with lyx circumnavigating latex? what other
alternatives are there? xhtml and css may generate hi-end typographic
output, yes? (i guess that is why google bought writely ...).


  It's all there already; called DocBook. Go for it.

  If you think LaTeX has a steep learning curve, wait until you write your
own DTD in XSLT or DSSSL (or whatever they are).


- finally a constructive suggestion. how about a bibliographic tool within
lyx to replace makebst with some WYSIWYG ?


  Because LyX/LaTeX is _not_ WISIWYG. If that's what you want, then use a
word processor that has that model for its core.

  Why do so many folks want to change the tool rather than themselves? If you
want custom page layouts (and covers), try Scribus. If you want to post web
pages on a server, use DocBook. For those of us who are more concerned with
content than with formatting, LyX/LaTeX is the ultimate writing tool, and it
does not need more in the menus or other interfaces.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Andre Poenitz]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 09:21:44AM -0400, Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong, 
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if you 
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

It's not 1).

Could be 2) for sufficiently large x.

3) might be a reasonable short-term solution if your thesis is due next
week.

 This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise 
 that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the 
 surface.

The problem is (as usual), limited development resources, and (rather
unusual) the ability to split these limited resources into four(!)
different frontends without doing a single one right (and recently also
into three(!) different build systems). A lot of energy goes into areas
related to re-inventing wheels and making development harder.

It's sometimes easy to get frustrated even by watching from a distance,
let alone from using it.

Andre'

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 19 June 2006 18:05, Rich Shepard wrote:
I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to
 publish my book, they provided their own class (svmono) for
 monographs, and they have a TeXpert on staff in New York because they
 prefer to get documents submitted camera ready. Well, when the
 TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for consistency with their
 standards, he asked me to replace all instances of \textellipsis with
 \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of TLC2, and
 discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
 specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of
 following punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all
 that minutiae, so I shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a
 global search and replace, and was done.

A simple
  \renewcommand{\textellipsis}{\ldots}
in ERT in LyX should have been sufficient. Just a tip for the future.

Regards,
Ingo


pgpbzQ8x5ZukT.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 19 June 2006 15:21, Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3)
 if you don't like coding, use a different tool.

From my experience from writing my thesis which LyX I'd say 1). When 
writing the thesis I first had to create a new layout file because I 
wanted to use the KOMA-script book class with the ntheorem package and 
the enumerate package. (Yes, I promised to upload this layout file to 
the wiki. I haven't forgotten.) Creating this layout file from the 
existing layout files took maybe half a day. Of course, for people who 
are not into programming it might have taken a bit longer, but using 
the documentation about layout files which is included in LyX and using 
an existing layout file to derive your layout file from it shouldn't be 
that difficult.

Anyway, after I had created this layout file I wrote my thesis purely 
concentrating on the contents. This took several months. Then, at the 
end, I've spent maybe a week to make my thesis look like I wanted it to 
look. Adding an index for all the mathematical symbols appearing in my 
thesis required the usage of some ERT. But I did this at the end and 
didn't worry about that while producing the contents.

So, in my case LyX clearly increased my productivity because I only had 
to do worry about other things than the actual contents for a 
relatively small amount of time.

Regards,
Ingo


pgpNdx50HnLGC.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if you
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

No:
4) Sit down, learn coding and implement the features you are missing. Or at 
least: 5) write down your enhancement wishes clearly and try to convince some 
kind soul to implement it for you.

This is an open source project, not a company where you can complain to.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Richard Heck]

Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...

I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.

Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.

The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the semantic
web. Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.

It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing in the humanities that 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Jeremy Wells wrote:


I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong, 
because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if 
you don't like coding, use a different tool.


1) You're wrong somewhat...

People in this list are really advanced user. I've been using LyX for 
more than ten years and didn't need to do any tweaking. Try it, the 
default looking of the generated documents is very fine already (above 
anything that Word or OpenOffice can produce, especially if you use math.)


As for citation you can just use the included citation support, no need 
to use natbib or jurabib for simple citation. Actually this simple 
citation support is already much more advanced and useful than MS Word 
reference feature.


Abdel.

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 19 June 2006 09:21 am, 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. 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?

Hi Jeremy,

I feel your pain. I'd dump LyX in a minute if it didn't produce such darned 
good, perfectly typeset output, and if it weren't so easy to slam out content 
with LyX.

Note I said it was easy to *slam out content*, not to make or modify 
environments (paragraph styles). In my estimation, creating a new style is 
between 5 and 50 times harder with LyX than it would be with Wordperfect or 
MS Word, and between 2 and 20 times harder than with Openoffice. It's 
frustrating.

What I recommend you do is this... As you write and discover that you need a 
new environment (paragraph style), go into your layout file and make the 
environment, but just make it bare bones so you can use it in the document. 
Then, on occasion, take off your content authoring hat and put on your 
LyX/LaTeX expert hat, and make all your new bare bones paragraph styles 
exactly what you want. That's what I tend to do. Fully coding each 
environment as it comes up makes you forget the stream of thought of your 
content.

As a rule, I don't see LyX as a timesaver when compared to wordprocessors. I 
see it simply as something that produces more pleasing and more professional 
output.


 Is the eventual goal of Lyx to GUIfy more of the LaTeX backend to avoid
 having to delve into adding tags? 

I think LyX has already GUIfied LaTeX, and in doing so made the actual 
authoring of content (as opposed to creating or modifying styles) very fast.

 Or will this tool remain relatively 
 marginalized, only used by those willing to undertake the significant time
 overhead needed to actually do productive work?

That's a loaded question. Consider the author whose boss or company hands him 
a fully functional LyX layout file, telling him only to use the styles 
contained therein. Such an author will find LyX trivially easy, and will brag 
to the heavens about how quick, easy and high quality LyX is. The same is 
true for the author who is satisfied with his document class's default 
styles, and I've known many such people.

It's only people like you and me (and many others on this list) who need their 
documents to look different from the document class defaults, or who need 
additional envrionments, who would consider LyX difficult.


 Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and
 bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use method (e.g., a
 GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any number of
 bibliography styles. Most importantly, customizing these styles again
 requires one to write more code, yet again, instead of engaging in the
 writing process.

 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if you
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

You're not wrong, but as I mention, LyX isn't as hard as you think either.

In my opinion, the day LyX finds a way to reread a document's layout files 
without closing and reopening the document or requiring the user to request 
Edit-Reconfigure, LyX environment and layout creation/modification will 
become MUCH easier, as modify/compile/test cycles go from 1 minute and almost 
10 mouse clicks to as little as one keypress of Ctrl+T, which compiles to 
postscript, and if you're in debug mode or coding mode or whatever they call 
the mode that would eliminate Edit-Configure and restarting the session.


 This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise
 that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the
 surface.

LaTeX is powerful and produces beautiful output, but that comes at the price 
of ease. LaTeX isn't easy. I had to buy a book and become familiar with LaTeX 
before LyX stopped being painful. When I write letters, or documents less 
than 20 pages, I use Openoffice. But I author and sell books, and the output 
of LyX is so good that in my opinion my books can't be discerned from those 
of a major publisher if it weren't for my self-designed covers and my staple 
binding method.

Like I say, I feel your pain. All I can tell you is that right now I'm 
authoring my third LyX created book. You might find some of my LyX writings 
helpful, because they were made in the same mindstate 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[David Neeley]

Jeremy et al.:

I am a relatively new LyX user, too. Among the documents I did in the
first days of using it was a 12-page, footnoted report. It was far
simpler than using a word processor be it OOo, Word, WordPerfect,
WordPro, KWord, AbiWord, or various others with which I am quite
familiar.

(I should add, I suppose, that I have worked as a corporate writer for
a very long time now, including several stints as a technical writer).

In my view, so long as what you are doing fits within the most common
uses, LyX is easy to use and the output is unmatched. However, I do
wish there were an easier environment in which to create new layout
files. Especially for those new to LyX/LaTeX, this is perhaps the
largest single stumbling block.

I am a firm believer in creating styles and using them rather than
overriding particular pieces of a document--to the fullest possible
extent. That makes upkeep of that document over time a much more
consistent effort with much less effort involved. It also makes
repurposing the document for other formats simpler as well.

It may be easy for those experienced in using LaTeX commands to
alter a given style file--but when the alteration is something that is
to be used repetitively, it is far superior IMHO to create a new style
to handle the variation...but that is something that is now quite
difficult.

David

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Eric Nystrom]

Jeremy,

I'm a humanities user as well (history) so I understand your frustration
however, I'll take an approach most similar to your #1 -- you're wrong:
Lyx requires a little more investment in document structures, formatting,
and so on, which is the point of most of the discussion on the list.
However, once you get it set up correctly, you can leave it alone and
everything works well, almost all of the time.  I'm currently writing my
diss (with jurabib and Jabref) and if I compile my document now, of course
the bibliographic citations in the footnotes aren't exactly how I want
them.  I know that at some point I'll take a couple of hours, spread over a
couple of days, to RTFMs, search the list archives and wiki, and even ask a
question or two on the relevant list.  I'll get the answers I need, then
make a couple changes, and everything will work right.  As long as I stay in
my field, I'll probably never need to ask those questions again.  Over the
long run, this is a great investment of my time.  (This is, of course, a
recapitulation in micro of the overall philosophy of LyX - concentrate on
the writing, which computers do not do well, and leave the typesetting and
formatting to the machine.)

The other thing is that many of us use LyX because we think it's a superior
solution for our needs, of course, but also because we like the helpful
community here.  It's a place where people communicate with respect toward
each other, and contribute when it's possible to do so.  The willingness to
pitch in and make things work -- either for yourself or for everyone else as
well -- is a key part of this community.  Not all of us, including me, have
the time or inclination to learn how to code, but I deeply appreciate those
who do.  So -- how can people like us help?  Wide-ranging criticism is not
the best answer.  Detailed requests -- i can make it do X by placing this
ERT in each footnote, but could we perhaps have a button or macro to handle
that automatically? are more helpful to the developers. When we figure out
how to solve a problem that vexes us, we can post our solution to the list
or the wiki, to make it part of the public record.  (I'm quite grateful to
the multiple participants in the Convert to Word discussions of a while
ago, for example.)  We humanists have particular expertise with
documentation - perhaps creating, revising, or tweaking the docs may be of
help.  In short, please appreciate this community both for what it is and
what it is not; and if you are looking to contribute, there are many ways of
doing so.

Best regards,

-Eric

On 6/19/06, Juergen Spitzmueller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if
you
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

No:
4) Sit down, learn coding and implement the features you are missing. Or
at
least: 5) write down your enhancement wishes clearly and try to convince
some
kind soul to implement it for you.

This is an open source project, not a company where you can complain to.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Martin A. Hansen]

hello jeremy


i agree with you on your observations.

i find lyx a very nice editor for formatting documents, however, i also have
this feeling that most of my time is spend on the steep learning slopes of
latex (which is because all the lyx things are fast and easy!).

in my humble oppinion, latex is complicated - perhaps too complicated and
clearly the time robber for all of us?!?

so i would like to add to your post some questions about considering
alternatives to latex as layout engine. would it be possible (and feasible)
to integrate tex commands with lyx circumnavigating latex? what other
alternatives are there? xhtml and css may generate hi-end typographic
output, yes? (i guess that is why google bought writely ...).


- finally a constructive suggestion. how about a bibliographic tool within
lyx to replace makebst with some WYSIWYG ?

sincerely,


martin

On 6/19/06, Jeremy Wells [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. 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?

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?

Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and
bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use
method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or
any number of bibliography styles. Most
importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more
code, yet again, instead of engaging in the
writing process.

I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll
be there; or 3) if you don't like coding, use a different tool.

This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise
that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's
awfully rough beneath the surface.

-Jeremy

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, David Neeley wrote:


I am a firm believer in creating styles and using them rather than
overriding particular pieces of a document--to the fullest possible extent.
That makes upkeep of that document over time a much more consistent effort
with much less effort involved. It also makes repurposing the document for
other formats simpler as well.


David,

  If you cannot easily adjust an existing style (including Memoir and KOMA),
but it's important for you to have something custom-built for your needs or
those of your company, why not hire one of the LyX developers to create it for
you to your specifications?

  It may not be the case that the majority of users need -- even want -- to
create new styles. I'm not a graphic artist or page layout expert, so I'm
grateful that those who have those skills have designed layouts and typefaces
that are elegant and communicate easily and well. And I just use them, happy
that I don't have to concern myself with these details.

  We take our vehicles to a professional mechanic when we don't have the
skills or time to learn how to do it ourselves, Our economies are filled with
specialists, and we have the option of investing the time and effort learning
how to something complex ourselves or hiring those who already know how to do
it. Open source applications (such as LyX) are created, maintained, and
improved by volunteers, in their spare time. It's not unreasonable to hire
them for custom work.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Stephen Harris]

Richard Heck wrote:

Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...

I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.

Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.

The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the semantic
web. Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.

It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Richard Heck wrote:


I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.)


Richard,

  When I worked for others in the corporate world, I found that the PHBs were
the worst on this. They'd obsess about format (why can't you put the org
chart block on the other side?) than the content. This is probably still the
case, as seen in Dilbert each day.


Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway.


  I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to publish my
book, they provided their own class (svmono) for monographs, and they have a
TeXpert on staff in New York because they prefer to get documents submitted
camera ready. Well, when the TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for
consistency with their standards, he asked me to replace all instances of
\textellipsis with \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of
TLC2, and discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of following
punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all that minutiae, so I
shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a global search and replace,
and was done.

  I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis and \ldots.
:-)

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Martin A. Hansen wrote:


so i would like to add to your post some questions about considering
alternatives to latex as layout engine. would it be possible (and feasible)
to integrate tex commands with lyx circumnavigating latex? what other
alternatives are there? xhtml and css may generate hi-end typographic
output, yes? (i guess that is why google bought writely ...).


  It's all there already; called DocBook. Go for it.

  If you think LaTeX has a steep learning curve, wait until you write your
own DTD in XSLT or DSSSL (or whatever they are).


- finally a constructive suggestion. how about a bibliographic tool within
lyx to replace makebst with some WYSIWYG ?


  Because LyX/LaTeX is _not_ WISIWYG. If that's what you want, then use a
word processor that has that model for its core.

  Why do so many folks want to change the tool rather than themselves? If you
want custom page layouts (and covers), try Scribus. If you want to post web
pages on a server, use DocBook. For those of us who are more concerned with
content than with formatting, LyX/LaTeX is the ultimate writing tool, and it
does not need more in the menus or other interfaces.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
http://www.appl-ecosys.com Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Andre Poenitz]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 09:21:44AM -0400, Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong, 
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3) if you 
 don't like coding, use a different tool.

It's not 1).

Could be 2) for sufficiently large x.

3) might be a reasonable short-term solution if your thesis is due next
week.

 This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise 
 that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the 
 surface.

The problem is (as usual), limited development resources, and (rather
unusual) the ability to split these limited resources into four(!)
different frontends without doing a single one right (and recently also
into three(!) different build systems). A lot of energy goes into areas
related to re-inventing wheels and making development harder.

It's sometimes easy to get frustrated even by watching from a distance,
let alone from using it.

Andre'

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 19 June 2006 18:05, Rich Shepard wrote:
I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to
 publish my book, they provided their own class (svmono) for
 monographs, and they have a TeXpert on staff in New York because they
 prefer to get documents submitted camera ready. Well, when the
 TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for consistency with their
 standards, he asked me to replace all instances of \textellipsis with
 \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of TLC2, and
 discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
 specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of
 following punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all
 that minutiae, so I shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a
 global search and replace, and was done.

A simple
  \renewcommand{\textellipsis}{\ldots}
in ERT in LyX should have been sufficient. Just a tip for the future.

Regards,
Ingo


pgpbzQ8x5ZukT.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 19 June 2006 15:21, Jeremy Wells wrote:
 I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) no, you're wrong,
 because...; 2) wait x number of years and we'll be there; or 3)
 if you don't like coding, use a different tool.

From my experience from writing my thesis which LyX I'd say 1). When 
writing the thesis I first had to create a new layout file because I 
wanted to use the KOMA-script book class with the ntheorem package and 
the enumerate package. (Yes, I promised to upload this layout file to 
the wiki. I haven't forgotten.) Creating this layout file from the 
existing layout files took maybe half a day. Of course, for people who 
are not into programming it might have taken a bit longer, but using 
the documentation about layout files which is included in LyX and using 
an existing layout file to derive your layout file from it shouldn't be 
that difficult.

Anyway, after I had created this layout file I wrote my thesis purely 
concentrating on the contents. This took several months. Then, at the 
end, I've spent maybe a week to make my thesis look like I wanted it to 
look. Adding an index for all the mathematical symbols appearing in my 
thesis required the usage of some ERT. But I did this at the end and 
didn't worry about that while producing the contents.

So, in my case LyX clearly increased my productivity because I only had 
to do worry about other things than the actual contents for a 
relatively small amount of time.

Regards,
Ingo


pgpNdx50HnLGC.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Jeremy Wells wrote:
> I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong,
> because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3) "if you
> don't like coding, use a different tool."

No:
4) Sit down, learn coding and implement the features you are missing. Or at 
least: 5) write down your enhancement wishes clearly and try to convince some 
kind soul to implement it for you.

This is an open source project, not a company where you can complain to.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Richard Heck]

Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...

I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.

Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.

The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the "semantic
web". Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.

It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing in the humanities 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Jeremy Wells wrote:


I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong, 
because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3) "if 
you don't like coding, use a different tool."


1) You're wrong somewhat...

People in this list are really advanced user. I've been using LyX for 
more than ten years and didn't need to do any tweaking. Try it, the 
default looking of the generated documents is very fine already (above 
anything that Word or OpenOffice can produce, especially if you use math.)


As for citation you can just use the included citation support, no need 
to use natbib or jurabib for simple citation. Actually this simple 
citation support is already much more advanced and useful than MS Word 
reference feature.


Abdel.

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 19 June 2006 09:21 am, 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. 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?

Hi Jeremy,

I feel your pain. I'd dump LyX in a minute if it didn't produce such darned 
good, perfectly typeset output, and if it weren't so easy to slam out content 
with LyX.

Note I said it was easy to *slam out content*, not to make or modify 
environments (paragraph styles). In my estimation, creating a new style is 
between 5 and 50 times harder with LyX than it would be with Wordperfect or 
MS Word, and between 2 and 20 times harder than with Openoffice. It's 
frustrating.

What I recommend you do is this... As you write and discover that you need a 
new environment (paragraph style), go into your layout file and make the 
environment, but just make it bare bones so you can use it in the document. 
Then, on occasion, take off your content authoring hat and put on your 
LyX/LaTeX expert hat, and make all your new bare bones paragraph styles 
exactly what you want. That's what I tend to do. Fully coding each 
environment as it comes up makes you forget the stream of thought of your 
content.

As a rule, I don't see LyX as a timesaver when compared to wordprocessors. I 
see it simply as something that produces more pleasing and more professional 
output.

>
> Is the eventual goal of Lyx to "GUIfy" more of the LaTeX backend to avoid
> having to delve into adding tags? 

I think LyX has already GUIfied LaTeX, and in doing so made the actual 
authoring of content (as opposed to creating or modifying styles) very fast.

> Or will this tool remain relatively 
> marginalized, only used by those willing to undertake the significant time
> overhead needed to actually do productive work?

That's a loaded question. Consider the author whose boss or company hands him 
a fully functional LyX layout file, telling him only to use the styles 
contained therein. Such an author will find LyX trivially easy, and will brag 
to the heavens about how quick, easy and high quality LyX is. The same is 
true for the author who is satisfied with his document class's default 
styles, and I've known many such people.

It's only people like you and me (and many others on this list) who need their 
documents to look different from the document class defaults, or who need 
additional envrionments, who would consider LyX difficult.

>
> Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and
> bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use method (e.g., a
> GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or any number of
> bibliography styles. Most importantly, customizing these styles again
> requires one to write more code, yet again, instead of engaging in the
> writing process.
>
> I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong,
> because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3) "if you
> don't like coding, use a different tool."

You're not wrong, but as I mention, LyX isn't as hard as you think either.

In my opinion, the day LyX finds a way to reread a document's layout files 
without closing and reopening the document or requiring the user to request 
Edit->Reconfigure, LyX environment and layout creation/modification will 
become MUCH easier, as modify/compile/test cycles go from 1 minute and almost 
10 mouse clicks to as little as one keypress of Ctrl+T, which compiles to 
postscript, and if you're in debug mode or coding mode or whatever they call 
the mode that would eliminate Edit->Configure and restarting the session.

>
> This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise
> that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the
> surface.

LaTeX is powerful and produces beautiful output, but that comes at the price 
of ease. LaTeX isn't easy. I had to buy a book and become familiar with LaTeX 
before LyX stopped being painful. When I write letters, or documents less 
than 20 pages, I use Openoffice. But I author and sell books, and the output 
of LyX is so good that in my opinion my books can't be discerned from those 
of a major publisher if it weren't for my self-designed covers and my staple 
binding method.

Like I say, I feel your pain. All I can tell you is that right now I'm 
authoring my third LyX created book. You might find some of my LyX writings 
helpful, 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[David Neeley]

Jeremy et al.:

I am a relatively new LyX user, too. Among the documents I did in the
first days of using it was a 12-page, footnoted report. It was far
simpler than using a "word processor" be it OOo, Word, WordPerfect,
WordPro, KWord, AbiWord, or various others with which I am quite
familiar.

(I should add, I suppose, that I have worked as a corporate writer for
a very long time now, including several stints as a technical writer).

In my view, so long as what you are doing fits within the most common
uses, LyX is easy to use and the output is unmatched. However, I do
wish there were an easier environment in which to create new layout
files. Especially for those new to LyX/LaTeX, this is perhaps the
largest single stumbling block.

I am a firm believer in creating styles and using them rather than
overriding particular pieces of a document--to the fullest possible
extent. That makes upkeep of that document over time a much more
consistent effort with much less effort involved. It also makes
repurposing the document for other formats simpler as well.

It may be "easy" for those experienced in using LaTeX commands to
alter a given style file--but when the alteration is something that is
to be used repetitively, it is far superior IMHO to create a new style
to handle the variation...but that is something that is now quite
difficult.

David

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Eric Nystrom]

Jeremy,

I'm a humanities user as well (history) so I understand your frustration
however, I'll take an approach most similar to your #1 -- "you're wrong":
Lyx requires a little more investment in document structures, formatting,
and so on, which is the point of most of the discussion on the list.
However, once you get it set up correctly, you can leave it alone and
everything works well, almost all of the time.  I'm currently writing my
diss (with jurabib and Jabref) and if I compile my document now, of course
the bibliographic citations in the footnotes aren't exactly how I want
them.  I know that at some point I'll take a couple of hours, spread over a
couple of days, to RTFMs, search the list archives and wiki, and even ask a
question or two on the relevant list.  I'll get the answers I need, then
make a couple changes, and everything will work right.  As long as I stay in
my field, I'll probably never need to ask those questions again.  Over the
long run, this is a great investment of my time.  (This is, of course, a
recapitulation in micro of the overall philosophy of LyX - concentrate on
the writing, which computers do not do well, and leave the typesetting and
formatting to the machine.)

The other thing is that many of us use LyX because we think it's a superior
solution for our needs, of course, but also because we like the helpful
community here.  It's a place where people communicate with respect toward
each other, and contribute when it's possible to do so.  The willingness to
pitch in and make things work -- either for yourself or for everyone else as
well -- is a key part of this community.  Not all of us, including me, have
the time or inclination to learn how to code, but I deeply appreciate those
who do.  So -- how can people like us help?  Wide-ranging criticism is not
the best answer.  Detailed requests -- "i can make it do X by placing this
ERT in each footnote, but could we perhaps have a button or macro to handle
that automatically?" are more helpful to the developers. When we figure out
how to solve a problem that vexes us, we can post our solution to the list
or the wiki, to make it part of the public record.  (I'm quite grateful to
the multiple participants in the "Convert to Word" discussions of a while
ago, for example.)  We humanists have particular expertise with
documentation - perhaps creating, revising, or tweaking the docs may be of
help.  In short, please appreciate this community both for what it is and
what it is not; and if you are looking to contribute, there are many ways of
doing so.

Best regards,

-Eric

On 6/19/06, Juergen Spitzmueller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Jeremy Wells wrote:
> I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong,
> because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3) "if
you
> don't like coding, use a different tool."

No:
4) Sit down, learn coding and implement the features you are missing. Or
at
least: 5) write down your enhancement wishes clearly and try to convince
some
kind soul to implement it for you.

This is an open source project, not a company where you can complain to.

Jürgen

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Martin A. Hansen]

hello jeremy


i agree with you on your observations.

i find lyx a very nice editor for formatting documents, however, i also have
this feeling that most of my time is spend on the steep learning slopes of
latex (which is because all the lyx things are fast and easy!).

in my humble oppinion, latex is complicated - perhaps too complicated and
clearly the time robber for all of us?!?

so i would like to add to your post some questions about considering
alternatives to latex as layout engine. would it be possible (and feasible)
to integrate tex commands with lyx circumnavigating latex? what other
alternatives are there? xhtml and css may generate hi-end typographic
output, yes? (i guess that is why google bought writely ...).


- finally a constructive suggestion. how about a bibliographic tool within
lyx to replace makebst with some WYSIWYG ?

sincerely,


martin

On 6/19/06, Jeremy Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. 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?

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?

Judging from the number of posts to this lists, citations and
bibliographies are a major issue. There is no easy to use
method (e.g., a GUI) that can define the options for natbib, jurabib, or
any number of bibliography styles. Most
importantly, customizing these styles again requires one to write more
code, yet again, instead of engaging in the
writing process.

I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong,
because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll
be there"; or 3) "if you don't like coding, use a different tool."

This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise
that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's
awfully rough beneath the surface.

-Jeremy

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, David Neeley wrote:


I am a firm believer in creating styles and using them rather than
overriding particular pieces of a document--to the fullest possible extent.
That makes upkeep of that document over time a much more consistent effort
with much less effort involved. It also makes repurposing the document for
other formats simpler as well.


David,

  If you cannot easily adjust an existing style (including Memoir and KOMA),
but it's important for you to have something custom-built for your needs or
those of your company, why not hire one of the LyX developers to create it for
you to your specifications?

  It may not be the case that the majority of users need -- even want -- to
create new styles. I'm not a graphic artist or page layout expert, so I'm
grateful that those who have those skills have designed layouts and typefaces
that are elegant and communicate easily and well. And I just use them, happy
that I don't have to concern myself with these details.

  We take our vehicles to a professional mechanic when we don't have the
skills or time to learn how to do it ourselves, Our economies are filled with
specialists, and we have the option of investing the time and effort learning
how to something complex ourselves or hiring those who already know how to do
it. Open source applications (such as LyX) are created, maintained, and
improved by volunteers, in their spare time. It's not unreasonable to hire
them for custom work.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
 Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Stephen Harris]

Richard Heck wrote:

Speaking just for myself...and, yes, I'm an academic, a philosopher
(with mathematical interests)...

I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.) I'd
worry about formatting section headings, where page breaks occurred,
etc, etc. Now I don't. I just write and let LaTeX do all the work
formatting my document. (And, of course, when I'm writing logic, well,
you can't beat LaTeX when it comes to typesetting formulae.) So most of
the time, there is no ERT in my LyX documents at all, and the preamble
contains nothing more than what's needed to get fancyhdr to do its thing.

Could the formatting be tweaked? Sure. If you /want/ to worry about that
kind of thing with LyX or LaTeX, you're free to do so, and I've done
some of that tweaking myself from time to time: That's when you have to
delve into LaTeX. But precisely because LyX isn't WYSIWYG, formatting
issues don't stare you in the face while you're trying to write, and so
you are free to ignore them. (I find that I can write almost as freely
in LyX as I can when I'm just writing longhand.) Indeed, I find that one
of the first things people have to do, when they first come to LyX, is
simply to /stop worrying/ /about formatting/ and learn to focus on
content. It's a common complaint among college teachers that students
seem to spend more time worrying about the appearance of their papers
than they do their content, and, in that same vein, I often find myself
wanting to ask people who post formatting questions to this list how
much it really matters whether the gap about section headings is this
big or only that big and, for that matter, whether they really think
they know more about typesetting than the people who produced the styles
they're using. That's not to say there aren't legitimate issues that
arise, and if you're self-publishing books, like Steve Litt, for
example, or trying to get your thesis into the appropriate format, then
you're going to have more such issues to handle. But a lot of these have
been encountered by other people, and a lot of them have been solved by
people who posted the resulting LaTeX packages on CTAN. And for the most
common issues, very comprehensive packages (like titlesec, say) have
been written to expose the internals in a comprehensible way. I strongly
suspect, however, that some very large percentage of the time, people
just need to /chill on the formatting/.

The core to LyX's advantage, one inherited from LaTeX, is thus that form
is separated from content. As you may know, that's kind of a mantra
these days. In this respect, LaTeX incorporates a primitive version of
the kind of /semantic/ markup that's supposed to power the "semantic
web". Because the markup is semantic, it's a relatively trivial matter
to convert a LaTeX document to a spoken format for the blind or to
reformat the document when it gets rejected by journal A and needs to be
resubmitted to journal B. Yes, of course you can do a more semantic
markup with Word or OO, but how many people actually do? Creating and
debugging styles in traditional sorts of word processors is every bit as
labor-intensive as doing it in LaTeX, and because traditional programs
make spot-formatting so easy to do, people don't put in the effort to
create or even to learn how to use styles. They just format
line-by-line. LyX and LaTeX purposely discourage that kind of behavior,
and that is a Good Thing. But to understand what a good thing it is, you
have to unlearn some bad habits.

It's true that bibliography formatting is a sore spot. If you can get
away with using standard styles like apalike, then it's simple, but
obviously not everyone can, and natbib, in particular, has some
wonderful features that could be easier to use. (That said, LyX 1.4.x is
a /big/ jump forward, and thanks to the developers for that.) Jurabib is
even more flexible, and it would indeed be nice to see a GUI to
configure it, as it can be pretty confusing, but I strongly suspect we
will see that. But here again, I think a mental adjustment is in order.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway. So for most people, natbib is going to
be more than sufficient. What's true, however, is that most of the focus
so far has been on scientific writing, and there are some issues
connected with writing 

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Richard Heck wrote:


I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.)


Richard,

  When I worked for others in the corporate world, I found that the PHBs were
the worst on this. They'd obsess about format ("why can't you put the org
chart block on the other side?") than the content. This is probably still the
case, as seen in Dilbert each day.


Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway.


  I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to publish my
book, they provided their own class (svmono) for monographs, and they have a
TeXpert on staff in New York because they prefer to get documents submitted
camera ready. Well, when the TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for
consistency with their standards, he asked me to replace all instances of
\textellipsis with \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of
TLC2, and discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of following
punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all that minutiae, so I
shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a global search and replace,
and was done.

  I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis and \ldots.
:-)

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
 Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Martin A. Hansen wrote:


so i would like to add to your post some questions about considering
alternatives to latex as layout engine. would it be possible (and feasible)
to integrate tex commands with lyx circumnavigating latex? what other
alternatives are there? xhtml and css may generate hi-end typographic
output, yes? (i guess that is why google bought writely ...).


  It's all there already; called DocBook. Go for it.

  If you think LaTeX has a steep learning curve, wait until you write your
own DTD in XSLT or DSSSL (or whatever they are).


- finally a constructive suggestion. how about a bibliographic tool within
lyx to replace makebst with some WYSIWYG ?


  Because LyX/LaTeX is _not_ WISIWYG. If that's what you want, then use a
word processor that has that model for its core.

  Why do so many folks want to change the tool rather than themselves? If you
want custom page layouts (and covers), try Scribus. If you want to post web
pages on a server, use DocBook. For those of us who are more concerned with
content than with formatting, LyX/LaTeX is the ultimate writing tool, and it
does not need more in the menus or other interfaces.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.   |The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM)|Accelerator
 Voice: 503-667-4517  Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Andre Poenitz]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 09:21:44AM -0400, Jeremy Wells wrote:
> I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong, 
> because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3) "if you 
> don't like coding, use a different tool."

It's not 1).

Could be 2) for sufficiently large x.

3) might be a reasonable short-term solution if your thesis is due next
week.

> This whole thing is extremely frustrating as I can see the huge promise 
> that the LaTeX/Lyx system can offer, but it's awfully rough beneath the 
> surface.

The problem is (as usual), limited development resources, and (rather
unusual) the ability to split these limited resources into four(!)
different frontends without doing a single one right (and recently also
into three(!) different build systems). A lot of energy goes into areas
related to re-inventing wheels and making development harder.

It's sometimes easy to get frustrated even by watching from a distance,
let alone from using it.

Andre'

Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 19 June 2006 18:05, Rich Shepard wrote:
>I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to
> publish my book, they provided their own class (svmono) for
> monographs, and they have a TeXpert on staff in New York because they
> prefer to get documents submitted camera ready. Well, when the
> TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for consistency with their
> standards, he asked me to replace all instances of \textellipsis with
> \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of TLC2, and
> discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
> specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of
> following punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all
> that minutiae, so I shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a
> global search and replace, and was done.

A simple
  \renewcommand{\textellipsis}{\ldots}
in ERT in LyX should have been sufficient. Just a tip for the future.

Regards,
Ingo


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Re: Confused about Lyx's goals -- isn't this supposed to increase productivity?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 19 June 2006 15:21, Jeremy Wells wrote:
> I suppose what I'm hoping for is someone to say 1) "no, you're wrong,
> because..."; 2) "wait x number of years and we'll be there"; or 3)
> "if you don't like coding, use a different tool."

From my experience from writing my thesis which LyX I'd say 1). When 
writing the thesis I first had to create a new layout file because I 
wanted to use the KOMA-script book class with the ntheorem package and 
the enumerate package. (Yes, I promised to upload this layout file to 
the wiki. I haven't forgotten.) Creating this layout file from the 
existing layout files took maybe half a day. Of course, for people who 
are not into programming it might have taken a bit longer, but using 
the documentation about layout files which is included in LyX and using 
an existing layout file to derive your layout file from it shouldn't be 
that difficult.

Anyway, after I had created this layout file I wrote my thesis purely 
concentrating on the contents. This took several months. Then, at the 
end, I've spent maybe a week to make my thesis look like I wanted it to 
look. Adding an index for all the mathematical symbols appearing in my 
thesis required the usage of some ERT. But I did this at the end and 
didn't worry about that while producing the contents.

So, in my case LyX clearly increased my productivity because I only had 
to do worry about other things than the actual contents for a 
relatively small amount of time.

Regards,
Ingo


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