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I personally find writing equations and symbols in LyX highly inconvenient. Moving my hand back and forth between keyboard and mouse is annoying.

But then again I am just speaking for myself, who only writes documents on mathematics and not other subjects.

It sounds like you're doing it wrong. Studying physics, I write a fair number of equations. You can type in commands like \log in math mode just as if editing a tex file directly, and there are keyboard shortcuts for doing most things you might conceivably want to do. In fact, because the shortcuts are shorter than function names and you don't have to fuss with opening and closing braces, it should take fewer keystrokes total and, thus, be faster.

mods are slacking today. Lyx looks great, and addresses the article well.

a document format that I'll be able to use for 10 years, or 20.

Then use TeX or LaTeX for your documents.
You can even have (some) WYSIWYG with http://www.lyx.org/

And you can go even less wrong with LYX http://www.lyx.org/ the what-you-see-is-what-you-mean latex editor. Don't let the website fool you, this program is excellent and supports everything you want and more. It's also FOSS and Qt4

Yeah, maybe LaTeX, but use a better front-end, like http://lyx.org/LyX. Then you can apply the formatting as you type.

Or LyX, if you like the pretty LaTeX output but aren't so keen on programming your documents.

You should probably try http://www.lyx.org/

LyX is a really nice front-end to LaTeX. With ImageMagick, I haven't had any image format problems. True, it does not help create new document classes, but I just Google for them and find what I need. TeXLive should take care of your dependency issues.

Have you run through its tutorial or used their online documentation? It's really a nice, modern app. Cross-platform. GPL. Give it another try.

It seems one has to export the .tex from LyX and convert manually with xetex.

No, LyX does all the exporting for you. It is, actually, quite awesome for book-publishing — I've converted a number of plain-text files into publishable PDFs by simple scripts and subsequent touching-up in LyX GUI.

You forgot LyX. Also, the 'txfonts' package is made of awesome, and I highly recommend it.

There is a front end for LaTeX called Lyx, but most people find it easier to do formulae directly in LaTeX once they have some experience.

You are asking for Lyx, the Document Processor. It is basically a GUI frontend to LaTeX, and it hides all (most) of the underlying code. It also retains nearly all of LaTeX's flexibility.

Have you tried LyX . It is essentially a front-end to LaTeX. It advertises itself as a "document processor", and addresses many of your concerns. Saved me while I was writing my dissertation.

I think you will be pleased. http://wiki.lyx.org/

You're all wrong - open source software IS capable of innovation. For instance, take a look at LyX, a document processor that beats all else hands down. For that matter, LaTeX itself is open source and is the gold standard in creating technical documents. Neither of these is a copy of a closed source original.

The free software/open source approach works well where people can scratch their own itches - in fields where those who need technical innovation are also capable of developing the technology to do it, such as science and mathematics. It fares less well for products which are developed to be sold to someone else - `office suite' software, or for that matter computer monitor hardware (to get us back onto topic). However, saying that open source is incapable of innovation is like saying that all major discoveries are made by commercial entities rather than universities.

There's LyX.

Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.

There's LyX. It's certainly different from your standard word processor, so that might be a bit off-putting for "typical" users. But it'd be a heck of a lot friendlier for them than vi/emacs + make. It comes with lots of tutorials that explain in detail why it's different from most word processors, and why that's better. If you haven't yet seen it, I'd say it's worth a look.

I looked at http://www.lyx.org/ a few years ago, and it was alright. It wasn't what I wanted though, not needing or knowing LaTeX.

However, you already use TeX, so it might just what you want.

Or alternatively, have a look at AbiWord from http://www.abisource.com/ it is simple, and shouldn't screw things up if you use the native file format (an XML based thingy).

I use AbiWord all the time for quick loading WP without too many fancy things. One caveat, it sometimes crashes for no explicable reason, and then causes you to have to re-write everything that you hadn't saved.

He used TeX formatting. Put that post through any TeX/LaTeX interpreter (like LyX) and you should get readable math formulae.

LyX?

I had no difficulty at all getting it installed on OS X with the DMG they have ont he wiki...shouldn't need to do anything about any dependencies manually either.

http://wiki.lyx.org/Mac/Mac?from=LyX.LyXOnMac#toc2

For those who like the semantics-first approach of LaTeX but don't want to type out formatting codes manually, LyX serves as a good compromise. (some weird bugs notwithstanding.)

You want LyX. It's not quite WYSIWYG, it's WYSIWYM, or What You See Is What You Mean.

Tried LyX lately? It does what you just described---you type your type, you type your equations, and LyX takes care of most of the other drudgery for you---and allows you to insert TeX code should you need to do the low-level stuff. LyX then outputs a .tex file and uses LaTeX for typesetting.

1. Insertion of a figure in screen view layout followed by "We can now refer back to the picture as...".
2. Layout in paper view showing Figure 1 followed by the section heading, then "The following is the famous platypus EPS file:" then "We can now refer back to the picture as..." with nothing between the lines.

1. Insertion of a figure in screen view layout followed by "We can now refer back to the picture as...".
2. Layout in paper view showing Figure 1 followed by the section heading, then "The following is the famous platypus EPS file:" then "We can now refer back to the picture as..." with nothing between the lines.

It's the "killer ap" that got me to convert to linux full time.

http://www.lyx.org/

For long projects I've found LyX to be the easiest environment due to its WYSYWIM paradigm and easy handling of references, notes and citations. It's just very easy to simply get down to work with LyX. I'll grant you that I quite like the feature of Scrivener where one can have inspirational/reference material included in the appropriate section folder, but I wonder would it become distracting?

http://www.tug.org/

Use a front end of choice if you want. E.G.:-

http://www.latex-project.org/
http://www.lyx.org/
http://kile.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex

A Google search on "tex frontend" will yield many more.

Honest, before all the Deities, it's that simple.

dangitman wrote:

Just to clarify: The protocol of bittorrent was published before the "official" client. So, why would subsequent implementations depend on the client, when anybody could implement the protocol without referring to the official client software at all? The innovation was in the protocol, not the client.

The original idea was published in a free and open manner, which made it possible for people to create multiple implementations of it, whether closed source or not. You're getting hung up on semantic games here.

For a long time now, when people ask for an example of innovative open source desktop sofware, I've pointed them at Lyx. Lyx has a pretty strange way of doing things from the point of view of someone raised on Microsoft Word, in fact it's so strange I would guess that someone who thinks Word is the ultimate word processor probably couldn't follow what Lyx is for. You will no doubt object that Lyx has not taken the world by storm, but what does that have to do with whether or not it was innovative? Developing a new idea, and selling people on are two different things, though unfortunately Jaron Lanier seems to have conflated the two.

The piece of innovative open source software that I use most often, though, is "emacs" -- and arguably, it too is merely a niche app that has failed to take the world by storm, and yet ideas originally developed for emacs have been re-implemented under different names many times (windowing systems, ides, file managers...). It's hard for me to see this as a demonstration of the inherent futility of developing software like emacs.

And the objection that we can "only name a handful" of successful, creative pieces of open source software is truly inane. The web browser has transformed western civilization, and every web browser is essentially a clone of the original Mosaic. Responding to that example with a "well okay, that's one" is just crazy. Do you sincerely think that the iPhone is a historic event on the level of the development of the web browser?

You can also use something like lyx http://www.lyx.org/ (a WYSIWYM document editor) to generate latex documents pretty easily

If you're using a word processor to edit manuscripts, you get what you deserve. You should be using something like LyX, which is more rigurous and oriented towards allowing you to write content first and apply/change style later, at your convenience.

Besides, there's always LyX. Most of the power of LaTeX, much nicer learning curve.

I'm a technical writer, and for doing long documents, I would not use either of these products. Open Office, while prized by some of my colleagues, seems to have too many mission critical failures or half-baked features. Microsoft Office, while good for both the home and small business market, becomes a hindrance when you use it for larger projects with more diverse requirements. I can make either one do what it must, but I would prefer Adobe FrameMaker or its open source clone, Lyx.

Try LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

William

I suggest LyX. Easiest LaTeX editor (technically it's not a LaTeX editor, but it's close enough to one) out there.

I've used LyX (used it for my doctoral thesis) almost exclusively as a LaTeX editor. I highly recommend it for just about anyone (it's available for OS X, Windows, and, of course, linux). It comes with its own tutorial.
http://www.lyx.org/

Or Lyx! I've been using it to write my thesis and it's fantastic. A tad hard to customize, but usually I find if you have to customize you're probably doing something wrong. In cases where you do need custom output formatting it's probably not the right tool for the job. But for paper/thesis and letter writing, nothing beats it.

Even better: use LyX. Then you only need to learn LaTeX if you need to take advantage of its more advanced features.

Well, the LaTeX3 folks did take time out to finish documenting LaTeX2e (the 2nd edition of _The LaTeX Companion_ is _excellent_).

There aren't that many tools competing w/ TeX in the layout field:

ANT - ant is not text --- http://ant.berlios.de/ --- or at least that's where it was. Site's not responding now, hopefully temporary. Needs the ability to place a .pdf as a graphic, then I could start trying it out in some real-world cases

LOUT - http://lout.sourceforge.net/ --- I can never get past the really rough-looking example files

InDesign --- while it's getting better, it's still got a long way to go.

Quark --- the less said the better.

SoftMagic's MLayout --- www.softmagic.com - needs better H&J, but one of the more interesting efforts.

The big issue w/ the graphical tools is that they're limited by available labour, which can be an issue for jobs which can't be divided up for parallel work at multiple stations and their featuresets --- multiple-line run-in heads are _not_ easily automated in InDesign so have to be handled on an individual basis, parts of index entries or portions of section marks in a running head can't be tagged w/ character styles &c.

And of course there are TeX successors, and a continuing improvement in related tools --- LyX, http://www.lyx.org/ is one of the most innovative of these.

William

Once you get out from under the oppression of your supervisors format preferences, give http://www.lyx.org/ a try. It is a nice interface to LaTeX that is almost WYSIWYG like MS Word but outputs documents in the same way as LaTeX so they are always beautifully typeset. With the new "track changes" tool LyX has, you might even be able to convert a few others as well.

The OO.o equation editor is shit, but so is Word's. I've been writing all my technical stuff in LyX for the past 10 years now.

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

Did you ever try LyX? http://www.lyx.org/

I last used it for an academic paper several years ago. It was functional but still using the ancient XForms toolkit.

The software is undergoing a major overhaul with Qt4 being used as the toolkit. More info here.

I question whether your reluctance to recommend it to anyone was due to the clunky toolkit (mine), or the paradigm shift from traditional word processors. I still shake my head when ask to do tech support for relatives who struggle with the complexities of MS Word when editing the simplest of documents. I wonder if they'd had a clean modern interface such as LyX 1.5 as their first computerized typewriter application they'd have coped better.

Well you're probably covered with distribution advice, I'll just recommend heartily that if you're going to be doing a lot of LaTeX , You should get a nice gui front-end to take care of the mindless task of tag insertion.

LyX simplifies things to such a degree that it's almost not worth editing LaTeX files by hand anymore. It's just so much more convenient, and has the most efficient and stable equation editing environment I have seen. The only downside is the danger that you'll forget LaTeX markup or never learn it.

Whatever distribution you choose should have a fairly recent version of it in one of its repositories. There is a windows version out if you have a LaTeX installed already(miktex for instance) and want to try it.

For your publishing activities, you might like to install both Scribus and LyX in addition to the TeX and LaTeX you mention.

While the suggestion to buy a Mac is marked 'Funny', and was, I'm sure, intended to be such, it's actually not such a silly suggestion because Macs do run Linux very well, and if you find you don't like Linux, which while being superbly user friendly, it does tend to be somewhat pickey about the friendships it makes. If you and Linux just do not get on, you still have a very good piece of hardware and software in your possession. Macs will also run the software I have mentioned using the X-11 server from either Apple or Fink. That's in addition to all the proprietary software offered by Apple and their ISVs.

I think the KDE interface makes more sense for the Linux newbie, and the Kubuntu distribution has many advantages as well. As mentioned above, tremendous online resources and a very active community for advice and support are substantial advantages.

For LaTeX, I suggest Lyx...available for your Windows side as well as in Linux. See http://www.lyx.org/

I would also create a separate partition for those things you will need to share between both windows and Linux. I'd probably format this as a fat32 partition, since that is somewhat simpler to use for Linux and will appear transparent to Windows. The occasional glitch in the handling of NTFS partitions is not worth the hassle, yet you are bound to have a fair amount of information that it would be helpful to have available in either side.

David