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"I actually use OOo all the time. It's still very annoying - when I need to layout some complex documents"

If you want to preserve layout don't use either msOffice or OO use LaTeX or LYX a GUI front end. Even transfering a word document between different machines is problematical as the formating changes depending on the installed printer.

"Calc doesn't have many features present in Excel - analysis, graphs, etc.... I mean, how hard could it be to add an interpolation feature?"

The one feeture it does have is it actually does the sums correctly, unlike Excel.

Browse OpenOffice forum, post top msg to slashdot.

was Re:my failed attempt to evangelize (Score:1)

Rather than VI and LaTeX, you may find LyX more comfortable. It's more word-processor-like, but w/ an interesting and innovative concept, it's a ``What You See Is What You Mean'' _Document_ Processor.

http://www.lyx.org/

Then, once it's done you can export to LaTeX and hack at things to your heart's content.

William

Why not use LyX? GUI TeX without the hassle. I just finished a paper with it, and damn, it's easy to use.

But in the end I think all this "we can do that too" mentality ends up stifling free software. While I applaud the efforts of OO and am grateful for it's inclusion in modern distros I would also love to see them wake up one day and deceide they were going to take a "and now for something completely different" approach.

Take a look at LyX for a completely different take on word processing. I've found its user interface to be very pleasant to work with---all you have to do is write, and everything turns out looking great without you having to give it any thought. It's not compatible with MS Office or OO.o, but it's still great for creating PDFs and printed documents.

Try it on IE7 http://www.lyx.org/

Rather than compare LaTeX to MS Word, it's far better to compare LyX, http://www.lyx.org/ --- I'm very fond of it, and think it's one of the most innovative opensource applications available --- maybe even more innovative than commercial apps as well.

And of course, no mention of (La)TeX would be compleat w/o suggesting people look at the TeX Showcase:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase

William

However, there are a lot of professional writers who have to integrate high proportions of graphics into their work, and for them a WYSIWYG tool is quite appropriate.

...or a WYSIWYM tool.

Also, if anyone knows of a free alternative (apart from learning them), I'd be interested.

LyX works.

In fact there's a Qt/aqua version precompiled. You'll still need the rest of LaTeX from fink or darwinports, but LyX works.

http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/LyXOnMac

A lot of what you wrote seems to be minor annoyances (at least from my perspective, since I don't do much in the way of web development, and not a lot of multi-threaded coding either) From the looks of things, a Mac would do me just fine, there is one thing that would drive me nuts though, and that is, if LyX didn't work....

For those who want to use Tex but don't want to do it the hard way (I recall that marking up maths was rather tedious and difficult to read sometimes) there is Lyx! I also like the concept of a "document processor". http://www.lyx.org/ http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/LyXOnMac?from=LyX.Mac

For those who want to use Tex but don't want to do it the hard way (I recall that marking up maths was rather tedious and difficult to read sometimes) there is Lyx! I also like the concept of a "document processor". http://www.lyx.org/ http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/LyXOnMac?from=LyX.Mac

You're right. That's why I started using LyX.

LyX ... forgot the link

Just started out with Vex http://vex.sourceforge.net/. It looks to be a pretty neat XML editor, based on Eclipse, with the DocBook DTD http://www.docbook.org/ built in.

I have been a longtime user of LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/ and have found TeXnicCentre http://www.toolscenter.org/ to be a nice front end for LaTeX. I have tried word-processors, but haven't really played with OO.org long enough to understand the sectioning and styles feature. Now, I recently re-stumbled over LyX http://www.lyx.org/
I think I will stick with LyX/LaTeX till I understand DocBook better.

On a side note, I came across NaturalDocs (http://www.naturaldocs.org/) yesterday. It looks to be a neat way to generate documentation without messing up the whole thing with tags.

Now, it would be a nice idea to take all these diverse ideas and combine them together into a single tool that can work as a driver for various formats (somthing like GCC, which can compile multiple languages). So, you need to know 1 tool, which can parse reST, NaturalDocs, Doxygen etc. You know, the great unified theory of text processing ...

I was also searching for a better way to create technical documenation and stumbled upon Lyx http://www.lyx.org/. It is a WYSISYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editor that gives you the power of LaTeX with a GUI frontend. You will find it truly amazing how fast you can write when you are not concerned with the layout of your text.

LaTeX (I'm pretty sure this is available for Linux & Windows too)
Mellel, which has some very good reviews
Manuscript
Which may not be as full-featured.

It really sucks that in the era of TeX, when the finest typesetting of the pre-computer golden age can be had again, publishing houses are getting even worse in making their products readable and easy on the eye.

Use LyX, let it take care of typesetting (using LaTeX, which in turn uses TeX, pretty much guaranteeing a high-quality end result), and concentrate on just writing. No paperclips, no automatic formatting messing things up, no time wasted on layout. Then export to PDF and send it to be published. Should be accepted anywhere...

I've never really understood how word processors became so popular. They are horrible to write with, since you need to constantly attend to layout and other secondary things, and they are horrible at layout too, requiring constant handholding and manual intervention to get even the simplest things done, and even then the correct end result is extremely uncertain.

Whoever first combines LyX-style easy text writing to an easy and realiable layout manager (which won't bother you when you write) is going to hit a jackpot.

I think that what the OP meant was that there are plenty of WYSIWYM tools for LaTeX...

far superior formula editing?

Having used both, I can honestly say that formula editing is not one of OO.org's strong suits. (unless what you mean to say is that you can tweak the formulas by hand if you want to, but you have to mess with their byzantine xml like markup. (is it actually xml? I don't know, I hate everything that uses anything even like it precisely because it complicates manual tweaking. Document markup code should be easy to understand at the text level.))

With "Mathtype, a more powerful version of equation editor" MS office takes the lead in utility (it falls short in manual tweaking, and they really should've just included it from the start rather than put spammy messages in their office suite every time you want to use eq editor)

But neither of them hold a candle to the latex-based equation editors out there. In both utility and source legibility. LyX for instance contains a powerful equation editor, that most importantly, is stable. It allows you to type the formulas from the keyboard rather than through some kind of cross between a bad paint program and an even worse cad program. It doesn't require entering some kind of weird object mode. It just goes right into math mode if you happen to be typing in the math box. if you hit the spacebar a couple of times, you're right back in regular text mode. And since the output is LaTeX, you can easily edit the formulas manually. And that's not even getting into the very prettyfied standalone mathematical editors.

I recommend LyX, which is kind of a GUI frontend for LaTeX in "what you see is what you mean" fashion. I started with LyX and I've learned LaTeX gradually by looking at tidbits of LyX output---you can export documents to LaTeX from LyX. Even now that I'm more familiar with LaTeX, I still write my papers almost exclusively in LyX.

I tried one chapter with LaTeX and foud out that actually I spend more time in LaTeX preparing my tables that doing the same thing in Word

You know, they have a graphical frontend to make that sort of stuff in LaTeX easier.

If you'd like the advantages of LaTeX without having to remember every nuance, then LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ ) is definately a GREAT thing.

Since converting to LyX all our documents come out with consistently high quality. Best of all, from LyX you can convert to almost any other format as you need.

LyX is a great front end for LaTeX Processing. It helps with the learning curve.

You can still do all the stuff you want from LaTex in lyx.

There is a version that runs on cygwin with and auto installer (you need a lot of components to get stuff to work, auto install should help).

Not quite WYSIWYG, but at least your equations and tables should work ok. LaTeX is the only way for complex documents.

http://wiki.lyx.org/pmwiki.php/Windows/LyXWinInsta ller

I agree with the sibling AC : LaTeX is the perfect tool to write scientific publications.
And if you don't like the "coding style" of LaTeX, you can use LyX.

I had that same problem, but no, aspell is something you need to have before you can install LyX... I think this link should get you everything you need... just grab the complete one...

Lyx is not good enough for them?

If you like notepad text+CSS, I recommend you have a loot at LyX. It's a LaTeX frontend and I've been using it for everything technical for about 10 years now. Using LaTeX means I can have any kind of output, from html to whatever format a journal/conference uses.

Then I went back and read it and found that document does reference pen and paper and it also says "All these thoughts and ideas have one common goal: Reduce the users effort while creating a document. The user should only enter the data e.g. the text and define a layout and a structure. He should concentrate on the things that matter."

Perhaps someone should implement this. Someone might even write a GUI frontend to it!

There is a Windows port of LyX which runs perfectly well on Windows XP, however most power users would prefer to run something like TeXnicCenter on Windows - or even just notepad and MiKTeX.

Not anymore, now lyx support windows. See http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/Windows

Arabtex with Emacs works quite nicely for what I need (Arabic quotes in European-language papers). Otherwise you could, you know, look at the information the arabeyes project put together on the subject (basically arabtex + lyx

We need a wordprocesser that encourages semantic layout. I'm talking about templates that are easy to use, not hidden, with accessible formatting controls (think WordPerfect reveal codes).

Here's a flaw. It's a pain in the ass to use. Where's my $327.68?

That's what LaTeX and ConTeXt are for. If you're more of a FrontPage/Dreamweaver guy than a vi/Emacs/Notepad guy then check out LyX

Meh... too bad I already posted in this story, so I can't mod this up.

Seriously, this is great advice.

See their website. It's way too useful. And cross-platform to boot.

You can do LaTeX in WYSIWYM way (M stands for Mean in acronym). Check out LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

"LyX is what?!

LyX is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software.

LyX was originally a Unix application, but now runs natively on Windows and Mac OS X as well, thanks largely to the cross-platform Qt toolkit.

LyX produces high quality, professional output -- using LaTeX, an industrial strength typesetting engine, in the background; LyX is far more than a front-end to LaTeX, however. No knowledge of LaTeX is necessary to use LyX, although it will give a user more power."

• Scientific Workplace (proprietary, win32 only
• LyX (F/OSS)
• TeXmacs (F/OSS)
• AbiWord (F/OSS, not the best TeX editor (but I had none of the problems you had))

Grandma has to use this? OK. LyX should do her fine.

"LaTeX" is not synonymous with "command line".

I agree to a certain extent, and I think if you were to attempt to build an office workflow based around "paperless" and entirely electronic document exchange, HTML could fit the bill quite well. But I can see a possible reason as to why HTML isn't used for more inter-office document exchange.

1) It quickly becomes a collection of files (figures, pictures, diagrams, charts, formulas, etc) which are inconvenient to manage. You have to attach say six different files to your email, or mess around with zipping it up, likewise at the recipient end.
2) Printing

As for (1), there's Microsoft's Compiled HTML which forms the basis of their help file format, not sure why that isn't an option in FLOSS (maybe it is, I haven't researched).

For (2), people want to control how the formatting looks on the printed page. You don't get that in HTML. And most word-processing, let's face it, is meant to be printed on paper. Depressing that computers have yet to provide a solution to the paperless office... but that's the way things are.

In my opinion, documents > 5 pages or so should be written in LaTeX but that's just me :-) (and for those that groan at this thought, take a look at Lyx).

I have been using Linux and various other Unices for years. I actually never used windows seriously until my current job, I went straight from DOS to Unix, then to Solaris, and then to Linux, with couple of BSD flavors for short periods of time sprinkled here and there.

In my current job I have a windows laptop for my office computer. I suffered for a while with the user interface and lack of any decent software, but after a while I found and installed bunch of programs that made it actually possible for me to get my work done. Curiously enough, lot of them are the exact same programs I have been using on Linux for years. Now most of the time, my windows box feels sort of like my linux box at home, as long as I don't try to do something special, and as long as I don't need to interact with the actual system (configure things, etc.). The worst problem is keybindings. It seems that in windows, the system reserves many key combinations so I cannot use them for my custom keybindings. Unfortunately, many of those seem to be exactly the combinations I have been using for years in my own custom FVWM setup.

Here are the applications I use on windows:

1) cygwin. From that, I mostly use rxvt, bash or zsh (I am a zsh junkie, but bash seems to work better for me on windows), and grep, less and couple of similar basic commands. Oh, and ssh and ncftp.

2) VirtuaWin with several modules for desktop switching and some basic window managment. Can't be compared to FVWM, but at least makes the system usable.

3) TXMouse (http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/) for focus follow mouse and X11-like cut and paste. This is absolutely wonderful application, which I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet.

4) proTeXt (http://www.tug.org/protext/) for my TeX distro. I used TeXLive before, which had more packages, but proTeXt integrates with windows better, and is based on MikTeX. For some reason, almost all windows applications that use TeX in any way expect to find MikTeX, and come preconfigured for it. With TeXLive, I usually had to do whole bunch of changes.

5) Vim with LaTeX-suite. I have been using this for a while on Linux, and I was very pleased to discover that it works just as well on Windows.

6) IPE (http://ipe.compgeom.org/) for my drawings. Again something I have been using on Linux for a while.

7) LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) when I don't feel like editing TeX by hand. I used to use LyX quite a bit before discovering LaTeX-suite for vim. Now I find using vim much faster and more flexible, but I think LyX should definitely be mentioned in this discussion.

8) Treeline (http://www.bellz.org/treeline/) for quick outlining, planning, to-do lists, notes etc. This is the only program which I didn't use on Linux before, and which I picked specifically because it works on both Windows and Linux.

9) Gimp and Inkscape for any graphics work. I have those installed, but rarely use them on Windows. For some reason I prefer to wait till I get home. I guess for this type of work, the windows user interface still gets too much in the way. Maybe it's also because it's a laptop. Also, the MathMap plugin for Gimp doesn't work on windows, and I use it a lot.

Anyway, with these, I can get most of my work done without the os getting too much in the way. If I need something extra, or something unusual, I just wait and do it at home.

Why even bother with word processors these days when LaTeX is more than capable of the vast majority of document typesetting needs?

You answered your own question. They want a word processor to process words easily, not a typesetter to set type professionally. Call me when LaTeX (or a LaTeX editor) has built-in spelling and grammar check, summarizing and wort count, changes tracking (CVS and SVN don't count), WYSIWYG mouse-based graphics tools, a clipart library, WordArt, etc.

LyX's home page agrees with me. "LyX...encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software."

In governments often the appearance is as important as the content. With a word processor they can standardize appearance however they want. With LyX it's certainly possible, but someone has to write a lot of LaTeX code and make a package, and possibly modify LyX's interface itself. Moreover, a) people are familiar with the Word/WordPerfect/Claris/etc. interface, and b) they want a WYSIWYG editor.

WYSIWYG is important. I had to print some text on a preprinted form; I did that by scanning it as a JPEG, typing over the picture in Word, deleting the picture, and printing. There's no way I could've done that in even one day had I been using LaTeX. No offense, but their margin system is impossible to use if you don't like the defaults (which are better, so they say, but sometimes you want different margins or positioning). Even CSS/positioning would work better.

WYSIWYM ?

*I* would expect people to use LyX. All the power of LaTeX, lots of easier to use.

It's not wysiwyg, it's wysiwym (what you see is what you mean). You type, with no latex code (unless you want to), doing all the latex stuff with pulldowns and key combinations - kinda like any other WP. You insert citations, references, etc. with dialogs. Your content simply gets typed and viewed in a format chosen for readability. When you want to see what it REALLY looks like, you preview in DVI or pdf with a simple keystroke.

The point is, this separates the content from the formatting. Especially in an office with standardized formats and relatively untrained typists/secretaries, this is great. One person can design the templates for LyX, and the typists simply type in and go. They actually don't need to know LaTeX at all, as LyX pretty much takes care of all of that. It's also got the best math equation editor I've ever used, bar none.

I've used LyX to write my master's thesis and several journal papers, and I don't know SHIT for LaTeX. I've got a reference that I can use if I need to... but I usually don't. It looks the way it's supposed to, it's easy to use, and the citations and cross-referencing mechanisms are superlative, both in terms of the underlying LaTeX functionality and in terms of LyX's user interface to those functions.

Basically, it's what I think a word processor oughta be. I think I would have torn out what little hair I have left if I'd tried to do that thesis in Word - it certainly wouldn't have been done as quickly. Did I mention that you can get LyX to spit out pdfs with the TOC, Lists of Figures, Index, etc. already hotlinked to their targets? Took me 10 minutes to figure out the line in the preamble to make that happen, which is a LOT quicker than having to try to manually create all those links. Yes, that's LaTeX functionality, not LyX - but LyX lets you have the best of both worlds.

I don't think anyone expects you to write all that LaTeX code and keep rendering to see if what you've typed works. Good news is, you don't need to.

I've been using LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) to take research notes for quite some time. It has all the advantages of Latex (it runs latex in the background to generate the PS, PDF, etc..) combined with a sexy GUI with floating menus for the math stuff (so you don't have to remember all of those "crazy" names) as well as letting you directly type the ones you do know by heart... All in all, the best thing since sliced bread... at least for note taking (notes in sliced bread tend to get mouldy after a couple of weeks!)

Why do it the hard way? Use something like LyX as a frontend. It offers a nice equation editor and reduces the need for manual tex/latex writing significantly (basically, if you want something fancy, you may have to do it manually, but routine stuff becomes pretty transparent).

(Well, it does not help with the original question about Word->HTML conversion...)

I actually just graduated from a university CS program and I found that a laptop was useful in nearly all my classes. I used GraphViz for the finite state machines and related diagrams, and I used LyX for the ordinary notes. LyX, in particular, is really good at thinks like mathematical equations and all the Greek that seems prevalent in CS courses. Some times I'd use Dia for diagrams that aren't graphs.

I guess this thread is probably going to devolve into "is too!", "is not!", but I still have all the CS notes I value in soft-copy form and I expect to keep them backed-up for a long time.

Ian

The nicest LaTeX front-end is LyX, http://www.lyx.org/

The only pdf-editor like things around are drawing programs --- although Enfocus Tailor.app would do pretty much as you wish for PostScript documents, but it's not that accessible given that you need a NeXT or a copy of OPENSTEP to use it. The most reliable way to edit a .pdf is to use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in Enfocus PitStop. Not cheap. Not word-processor like (editing more than a character or two is a study in tediousness).

Using drawing programs to open up arbitrary .pdfs can be workable, but isn't word-processor-like --- that said, I've done it in the past (one example, book done in a proprietary composition program (Miles 33 for the morbidly curious) which needed reprint corrections --- open up the relevant chapters in FreeHand 8, get _all_ of the pages and formatting (after a few minor tweaks) then re-assemble the text blocks which want editing). These days I'd probably use Cenon for this, http://www.cenon.info/ (not saying it's as good as FH8, but at least it's viable today on decent OSes and being opensource is more likely to improve than FreeHand since its purchase by Adobe)

As an alternative, opening up a .pdf and directly converting it to .rtf is a useful option and may be more workable for you --- Marcel Weiher's TextLightning.app for Mac OS X (shareware at http://www.metaobject.com/ ) is one of the best programs for this.

NeoOffice has been workable for me thus far. For a spreadsheet in Mac OS X I've been using Flexisheet from Material Arts (opensource Lotus Improv / Quantrix clone).

William

I've just completed my thesis and have been quite happy with JabRef which a Java based frontend to Bibtex. It's really quite flexible and works well with LyX, Kile, or WinEdt. While I didn't need the capability, it can also import a whole bunch of formats.

... the normal process you expect in open source: You start with some one else's code, hack on it until you really understand what you wanted to do with it, and in that process replace all the original code to make your own product.

Indeed. Perhas the author can point us to the original "pre-hack" code for Emacs, LaTeX or LyX ?

It's kind of amazing that the FOSS community doesn't seem to have ever come up with a good, solid word processor.