Richard Esplin wrote:
LaTeX is a great way to build attractive and easy to maintain documents with very little effort. Any time that you want a good looking document, but you are not too picky about how exactly the document is typeset, LaTeX can do your work for you. It frees you from the formatting of the document so that you can focus on its structure and content.It astounds me how many people write up entire books in MS Word, complete with all the trimmings like table of contents, index, figures, equations, etc. Just asking for trouble. Word is not a typesetter nor is it a desktop publisher. MS Word (and OpenOffice and all the other programs that follow this flawed WYSIWYG paradigm) is merely a glorified typewriter.
Recently my mom attempted to put together a small history booklet for the family. It was about 100 pages and included photos and things. After dealing with document corruption and formatting and layout problems, I became convinced that LaTeX is the only viable tool for doing this sort of thing. Using plain text (UTF-8 for the language support) with a markup is clearly the only way to go. You will not have to deal with document corruption and they layout will come out the exact same on any computer time after time. Whereas MS Word will repaginate your document differently on a different computer. Fonts often don't come out the exact same width, etc. It's terrible.
Anyway, MS Word is good for writing a few letters to friends, maybe even a short 10 page paper (if you are lucky) for a class. But for anything that involves nice layout and longer documents, I will definitely learn LaTeX.
Does anyone have any opinions on Lyx?
Michael
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