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Why I picked LyX…

… and never looked back!

LyX.png

I’m one of those guys who rarely touches an Office suite. Most of the times that I fire OpenOffice were due to people’s lack of citizenship by sending proprietary formats like doc, xls or ppt that could have been sent in PDF instead.

But still, I write my papers, reports and several other documents. So, do I use plain ASCII? Not even close. I use LyX. LyX is a WYSHGWYG (what you see helps getting what you get) frontend to LaTeX. It minors the burdensome of typing all those LaTeX macros such that my main concern is about the content. I don’t care about the form. Most of the times there is a layout that should be used (like the LLNCS for writing papers).

The major advantages are:

  • it has version control integration (despite the fact of being easier to manually keep the document on a repository); this is not possible to do with Microsoft Office documents since the file is saved under a binary format;
  • files are saved on plain text (a mix of LaTeX and some extended LyX tags) so you can easily recover the content upon a disaster;
  • it produces appealing documents whether on a printer or for a giant A0 poster; afterall, Donald Knuth wouldn’t waste 10 years of his life for nothing;
  • painlessly adds the summary of contents, index, appendix, etc..;
  • allows easy referencing with bibtex;
  • generate PDF, PS and DVI files on the run;
  • you can easily include LaTeX commands;
  • math editor;
  • professional visual output;
  • it support several platforms, from GNU/Linux to Mac OS X and even Windows;
  • last but not least, it is Free Software meaning that you can distribute, modify, copy, etc..

Haven’t tried it? Give it a go I bet you won’t regret.

P.S. - There is one task that is still a PITA to accomplish in LyX: tables. For such, I recommend you to manually write them in LaTeX. I hope that this will be addressed soon. Remember, it is Free Software so you can contribute ;-)


2 Responses to “Why I picked LyX…”

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  1. Carlos Rodrigues
    Published at March 15th, 2006 at 2:24 am

    “There is one task that is still a PITA to accomplish in LyX: tables. For such, I recommend you to manually write them in LaTeX.”

    Ok… I’m one of those guys that uses LaTeX the way it was meant to be used: by writing the code with a text editor (with syntax highlighting, of course), and I must say that if manually writing tables in LaTeX is easier than producing them with LyX, then LyX must indeed suck… Tables in LaTeX are an absolute pain in the ass, the stain on an otherwise clean white shirt.

    I guess there are tools to generate LaTeX tables out there. I’ve never used one though… Only once I had to write a report with enough tables to make me want to rip my brain out with a spoon and an ice pick.

    But the bright side… lots of people get scared just by the name LaTeX, but what they don’t know is that LaTeX would let them create beautiful documents with just a minimal amount of effort to get past the initial learning phase. Instead they keep spending hours formatting word documents, just to end up with butt-ugly fonts and badly formatted text.

  2. mlopes
    Published at March 15th, 2006 at 11:59 am

    Well, the versatility of using LyX is when you need to quickly start a document. LyX automatically adds the necessary headers so your main worry falls down to typing text. Export PDF and voilá.

    Would I use LyX on a master thesis with > 300 pages? Probably not. But on small documents I find myself more productive using it instead of typing plain text LaTeX.

    As for the tables, well, it’s only a peril if you need to use them ;-) Most of the times, I don’t, but when I do, I’d rather use LaTeX directly.

    Regarding your last comment about the Word generated documents, I couldn’t agree more.