How would LyX perform?

Steve Litt slitt at troubleshooters.com
Thu Dec 30 13:46:14 UTC 2021


Wolfgang Engelmann via lyx-users said on Mon, 27 Dec 2021 11:31:55 +0100

>This has shocked me
>https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
>
>Would be interesting to see how LyX performs

My first two books were written in WordPerfect 5.1. The next one was
written in MS Word. All the rest were written in LyX. I was happy with
all of them.

My worst nightmare would be authoring in raw LaTeX. By the time I
remembered the necessary LaTeX tag, I would have forgotten the point I
was trying to make in my writing.

LaTeX is a *lousy* native format for a document. It's suitable only for
fixed line PDF/paper. It's extremely difficult to convert to flowing
text HTML or ePub, unless you want to (urk) use Pandoc, with all the
implied compromises on appearance. In my opinion LaTeX should be only
an intermediate component in the authoring stack, that component being
for creating fixed-line PDF/paper.

Plain TeX would be much better than LaTeX, as a native format, if it
could handle fonts well. Does anyone know of a Plain TeX to LuaTeX or
XeTeX converter?

I'm working on an authoring tool whose native format is a Markdown
superset, with complete support of arbitrary styles. It's pretty easy
to go from that format to HTML or ePub, but to go from there to
fixed-line PDF/paper without using (urk) Pandoc is a challenge. But not
nearly as big of a challenge as going from LaTeX to semantic HTML.

Getting back to LyX, one of my books, "Key to Everyday Excellence",
could not have been written in WordPerfect or MSWord because the
(fictional) plot is so date driven that the current plot date appears
in the header. And although I used styles-based authoring in
WordPerfect and MSWord, I like that LyX enforces styles-based
authoring. LyX is quite a fast authoring environment --- the only way
it could be faster is to get rid of mouse usage.

In my opinion, for a document over 10K words, LyX beats the authoring
speed and ease of MSWord.

This discussion wouldn't be complete without including LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is a style-losing piece of junk fit only for
fingerpainting. Those who characterize LibreOffice as a substitute for
MSWord either don't use styles-based authoring, or they're fooling
themselves, or they know something I don't know.

By the way, my new book, "Making Mental Models: Advanced Edition", just
came out yesterday. It's made almost exclusively with LyX, Inkscape,
and shellscripts. A big thank you goes out to the LyX team who made
this possible.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques


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