How would LyX perform?

Thu Dec 30 17:29:27 UTC 2021

On 12/30/2021 8:46 AM, Steve Litt via lyx-users wrote:
> 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,

I always enjoy reading about your experiences with various document 
production systems, in part because I can relate to so much of it. While 
I haven't written books, in my former profession as a trial and 
appellate lawyer, I wrote countless legal briefs and documents. Most 
legal briefs run about 30 pages or so and share much of the formatting 
as books; a cover page, front matter with table of contents and a table 
of authorities and main matter with section headings, formatted text 
with headers, footers and footnotes. When presenting a brief in the U.S. 
Supreme Court, one presents it in the format of a paper-back book. The 
lawyer prepares the fully formatted document and then sends it to 
specialized legal publishers for final printing. In my case, I used 
WordPerfect for Windows as that is what my publisher preferred at the time.

I am old enough that I began with DOS and PC-Write. I graduated to 
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, then WP for Windows and later to Word. Finally, 
because I am cheap and actually read and try to abide by software 
license agreements, I downloaded StarOffice and have used it along with 
its various subsequent descendants including OpenOffice.org and now 
LibreOffice 7.x. I am sorry that you have had bad experiences with 
LibreOffice as I have always found it to be quite faithful and every bit 
as easy to use as MS-Word. In my years of use, I have never had it lose 
or mangle my styles. I don't think I'm fooling myself and I definitely 
use styles-based authoring, and I can tell I certainly don't know any 
more than you. It just works and, I often find that, when I try other 
systems, including LyX, LaTeX or an HTML oriented RMarkdown, I go back 
to LibreOffice to just get work done.

I agree with your assessment about LaTeX and LyX. When writing in LaTeX, 
I also get distracted by the many times I have to type \command{text}. 
When I found LyX, I was thrilled to see it shield me from so much LaTeX 
coding. I can even type a dollar sign in LyX ($) without having to 
remember to precede it with with a backslash to avoid slipping into math 
mode. I can't imagine trying to write a book in LaTeX code. But, I 
wouldn't hesitate to use LyX. I also agree it relies too much on the mouse.

I now teach at a local college and, for one of my classes, I wanted my 
students to do a book report on Charles Sheldon's book, /In His Steps/. 
Since it is an old book and now in the public domain, I decided to 
download it and create free formatted copies for my students to download 
and read. For fun (I'm weird, I know), I turned it into a exercise to 
compare different document processing systems.

I downloaded the book in plain text form and, after stripping out 
unnecessary line endings, tabs, and spaces, loaded it into the different 
systems. For my test, I used LibreOffice, LyX, a plain LaTeX editor 
(TeXWorks, I believe) and a Markdown system (ReStructuredText -- This 
was before I had discovered RStudio). At the time, my aim was to create 
PDF files from LibreOffice, LyX and TeXWorks and an HTML file with 
ReStructuredText.

I found that, of the systems, LyX was the easiest and "safest" to use in 
the sense that it produced the least surprises. TeXWorks also worked 
well as my formatting was very simple and, since I wasn't composing 
text, the LaTeX commands weren't an imposition. ReStructuredText gave me 
the most compromises, perhaps in part because my destination file was 
HTML. Finally LibreOffice also worked extremely well. I used page, 
paragraph and character styles and it all worked with no lost styles. My 
main objection with LibreOffice was that, every now and then over the 
course of 188 pages, I found random double spaces between words or stray 
line or paragraph endings that I had to fix. LyX just ignores such 
things, which is nice.

All of the systems produced excellent results. In short, I have learned 
that, whatever system one learns to use well, s/he will be proficient at 
producing the desired results. I think I agree with you, however, that, 
if I were actually writing the book and not just formatting it, I would 
have preferred LyX. I do love its editor, which forces me to use styles 
without allowing the formatting to get in the way of writing.

It reminds me of a study done back in the days of DOS vs. Mac. The study 
claimed that DOS users made better writers than Mac users. The argument 
was that DOS users focused on content while Mac users focused on 
appearance and formatting. I don't know how valid it was, but since I 
was reluctant to make the move from DOS to Windows, I liked what it 
said. Today, I find that, when I'm using LibreOffice, I fiddle much more 
with formatting while I type than I do when using LyX. It takes a lot of 
discipline to write with a WYSIWYG editor without getting distracted 
from substance.

Virgil
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lyx.org/pipermail/lyx-users/attachments/20211230/17a8a397/attachment-0001.html>