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LyX http://www.lyx.org/ is a great, great, wonderful tool, which is available on linux (mainly), OS X, and as a Windows port. My colleagues, many of whom have years of experience using "raw" LaTeX for academic articles, come to me for advice, and I've just been using LyX for a little while.
Even if they don't use LyX, I can almost always find an elegant way to do the things things they want with it, and then export the code to LaTeX so that they can do the same thing with LaTeX code. It's a very, very, very nice tool, and I actually *enjoy* writing with it.
Too, the LyX mailing lists are very helpful.

You wouldn't still happen to have that image around, would you? I'd very much like to see that. I'd make one myself, but I don't have Word around.

/* Begining of shameless pimping */

By the way, any other *nix users out there that are tired of document editors like Word, Abiword, or OpenOffice but still need formating ( vim's not cutting it ) have you seen lyx?

/* End of shamless pimping */

My god, who in their right mind would write up a Latex document in OO or Word? LyX is a much better application for Latex development. If you are willing to spend money and you want a similar application for Windows, try Scientific Word.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

I nominate LyX. It's not that different from the WYSIWYTYMG interface of Word, WP, OO Writer etc., but the differences stand out and makes you notice them and learn why they are there. And the main difference is forced consistency, normally a good thing when writing documents.

It does need to upgrade its look, though.

Or just use a WYSIWYG LaTEX tool like this one to do all that nasty coding for you :)

The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.

I've personally never seen a good wysiwyg equation editor.

LaTeX is amazingly cool technology. It kicks ass for Math, and Math intensive areas like Physics. LaTeX is required for submitting to most Professional Journals in these fields.

While the learning curve is about that of hand coding HTML, LyX - The Document Processor gives you a frontend interface that simplifies getting started and getting things done. The output is beautiful.

Probably you are confused between .txt and .tex. You can use just notepad or wordpad for the first. Only the second one refers usually to LaTeX. But even for that second one you can try, for example, the nice (and free) LyX (there is a standalone version for windows) and there are much other for windows (of course for the free operating systems there are much many).

Lyx... http://www.lyx.org/ is my favoite.

It's the reason I switched to linux.
It's the reson I bought an iBook.
It's the reson I passed some tough courses.

Down with WYSIWYG!

Lyx on Mac or Linux and even Windows for me.
Mac port:
http://wiki.lyx.org/pmwiki.php/LyX/Mac

Let a typesetter worry about the formatting while you concentrate on the content: LyX.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

LyX is a fantastic graphical word processor based on LaTeX. It's obviously outstanding for technical documents with lots of equations and you never have to touch actual LaTeX code if you don't want to.

http://www.lyx.org

Native versions are available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X.

Really, the best all-around word processor is TeX, but AbiWord seems like the best tool I've found so far for little quick jobs where TeX would be too much trouble.

For most of the power of TeX without a lot of the hassle, try LyX. It's a graphical front-end for LaTeX, with an interface akin to a word processor. However, it still applies TeX philosophy, namely, you supply the content and it will supply the layout, you don't need to mess with that.

For the same reason. In my experience, LyX-Aqua comes up much faster than a modern word processor has any business doing. On my powerbook, it displays the UI in three seconds.

I mean, really, backslashes and curly braces and magic keywords that have to be memorized?

try this out.

[But I still think a cross-platform, SVG+MathML editor with TeX-like math rendering would be a nice way to publish both web and paper documents, much better than the WYSIWYG word processors most people abuse.]

LyX attempts to do that. Really, though, WYSIWYG is not a very good paradigm for creating documents, and I believe that LyX suffers for that.

And what would be wrong with teaching them Emacs. Better than teaching them vi ;p. A lot of the tedious typing of TeX commands could be replaced with macros, and Emacs comes with a fairly nice graphical front-end for X nowadays. I also know of at least one graphical LaTeX editor.

At any rate, most clerical staff who work for law firms seem to have to learn at least one specialist system in addition to their general office suite skills, so we're not replacing their learning curve with a cliff here.

The real challenge is database integration (see some of my other posts in this discussion for more). If we do that, then we've got a winning solution. You might also want to check out Debian-Lex, a project to make a "legally aware" distribution of Debian, and which I first heard of in this discussion.

what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing?

Latex and Lyx

Problem 1: (long documents) is that whenever you choose different printer whole document gets screwed.

You might want to check out LyX. It lets you just write the darn thing and let computer worry about formatting it at printtime (as a book, as a newspaper article, as a letter...). You can then output the whole thing as PDF, HTML or whatever.

For all my serious document creation, I use LyX ) which is a LaTeX GUI front-end. LyX does have its share of nits, but it does a good job of separating the logical layout from the formatting and still gives you a good visual representation of the eventual document layout.

I built a document control system using LyX as the document processor and had the back-end automatically generate PDF and HTML output files for Web publication with CVS version control thrown in for good measure.

Best of all you can use LyX without having to know a whole lot about LaTeX. So it is good for the LaTeX challenged user.

LyX has a Windows/Cygwin port. It requires an X server to run, but Cygwin includes an X server for Windows. The backend is LaTeX, so you can do practically any math typesetting you want by editing the raw TeX code if you need to tweak something that LyX can't handle. Try it out and see what you get? LyX is interesting but I've never used it much since my document-writing is almost all in simple HTML or text--all I need is vim with syntax highlighting turned on. HTH,

It's here

LyX is a move in the right direction. It may not be quite abusive enough, but at least it doesn't allow a user to format using spaces and tabs and discourages direct font choosing.

But the world is concentrated on making absolutely unusable WYSIWYG crap instead of a decent human-readable structural markup language for serious documents.

Go get your WYSIWYM on (What You See Is What You Mean), while retaining all of the goodness that is LaTeX. No need to learn confusing TeX markup unless you really want to do so.

try this works great. All the simplicity you could ever want, plus, you can throw your own raw LaTeX code in wherever you like.

Cheers.

For example, instead of using Word, learn LaTeX. Hard? Maybe. BEAUTIFUL results? Yes.

Or just use LyX (which, according to its documentation, uses LaTeX internally and allows you to insert LaTeX commands into documents directly) and let the computer do the formatting for you. After all, there's no reason for you to worry about positioning everything with millimeter accuracy, when your computer is so much better at point-filing :).

Disclaimer: I've never used LaTeX directly and thus have no idea how difficult/easy it is. I've only used LyX and found out that I love just writing the content and letting the computer worry about representation.

The only problems I've had with LyX is that there's something seriously wrong with the PDF output, once deleting parts of some complex formula ended up generating LaTeX errors when I tried to view the document, and the Table of Contents apparently always has the text "Table of Contents" in English :(.

My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.

With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.

First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.) ... they'll all run hideously slow. If you can, do you word processing as plain text. If you absolutely need formatting (and you're not handy with LaTeX and related apps like Lyx), use HTML. Raw code is good, but if that doesn't work for you, try Bluefish (requires X). Once you're on a desktop system, you can import it into OpenOffice or Word, where you can make any additional formatting changes you need.

If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.

If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus.

You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.

That's all I can really think of ATM.

Lyx and texmacs is what my university used when creating written material for their math-courses.

You mean something like this.

Or maybe those grad students should just make Lyx's GUI more intuitive for the home/office user.

Once they understand what a documnet processor really does, I thinkthey'll be enlightened.

Get some students of the professor's course to type them into LaTeX.

With LyX, you get clean-looking output without having to tweak a ton of settings. It's very useful as a tool to get straight down to the business of composition, without worrying the output will look a mess.

"Please spare me the products that are at an 'excellent starting point.' Wake me up when something crosses the finish line."

Sorry to wake you

Start at the LaTeX project site.

Go buy Leslie Lamport's "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" book.

Take a look at the Indian TeX Users Group's LaTeX tutorial.

Then read Tobias Oetiker's "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e"

If you need a quick start then start using Lyx and their Tips and Tricks section.

I don't know if you would want to use a GUI but LyX is a great editor that exports to LaTeX, and supports alot of features. In this way you can quickly see lots of the functions that are available to you, and then export to LaTeX to see how to do them.

I find it particularlly useful for the math formulas.

Unless you feel you need the full, raw power of LaTeX, I would recommend using Lyx. It is a 'what-you-see-is-what-you-mean' graphic editor for LaTeX. I used it all through college for writing electrical engineering lab reports, and it was many time easier to use than Word. The result was so beautiful it even blew away my professors. And that was a few years ago, so it is probably even better now.

The fact that a *.doc was opened and the bullets didn't show seems about as insignificant as whether or not my work car is black or grey. The content was displayed fine and that's what counts. On those very, very rare occasions when you cannot view the content it only takes 30 seconds to export to pdf. I haven't run into a single professor/student who was unwilling to do so...and if I did, I would make sure they got nothing by LaTeX and sxw files from than on out. hehe

No GUI layout, as far as I know

Lyx comes to mind.

A pain to learn and use.

No more difficult than HTML for most tasks. Significantly easier for some and a bit more finicky for others.

lyx

LyX

Yeah! Really bad.

Oh the pain.

I'm also writing up my PhD, which also has a lot of equations in it. I knew about LaTeX from my undergrad days in mathematics and was happily writing my PhD in LaTeX until I discovered LyX.

According to the website LyX is a WYSIWYM document processor - What You See Is What You Mean. Basically, it's a Word-like frontend for LaTeX documents. Editing normal text is just like any word processor: ctrl-b for toggling bold, etc. But hit ctrl-m and you go into "math-mode" where standard LaTeX markup is understood and converted as you type into integral signs, sigmas, fractions, etc. Bibliographies, multifile documents, references and tables are all very well handled. It also has hooks for inlining XFig and other graphics including Grace plots.

At the end of the day (or paper), you still get beautiful LaTeX output but without having to worry nearly as much about compile errors. Why? Because, under the hood and behind the GUI you're editing LaTeX.

While I'm not completely familiar with Lilypond, from what I understand it's not trying to be the full, end-to-end solution for music typesetting. It's trying to solve the problem of how you can easily represent musical notation in a textual format and get it to print out into a format as close to human engraving as possible. In otherwords, think of it as TeX for music.

Just as there are GUI frontends for TeX (LyX, for instance), it's completely possible to write a GUI frontend for Lilypond. There are already several projects that might fit the bill on Freshmeat, and I'd be willing to bet that there are several more over at SourceForge (whether or not any of them actually make it past the pre-alpha stage is anybody's guess).

You bring up a good point, albeit indirectly, about the fools' bargain that is WYSIWYG word processing. I can't even begin to count the hours wasted fiddling around with the appearance of a document when I should be paying more attention to the actual content.

After years of wondering why I felt so much less productive with Word than I used to be with WP 5.2 I came across LyX and rediscovered the joy of creating documents instead of processing words. As an added bonus, you get the TeX/LaTeX professional typesetting system to do the heavy lifting and make your content look beautiful. For those of you not familiar with LyX, LaTeX and the venerable TeX, take a look at the Introduction to LyX and explore the rest of the LyX site.

You bring up a good point, albeit indirectly, about the fools' bargain that is WYSIWYG word processing. I can't even begin to count the hours wasted fiddling around with the appearance of a document when I should be paying more attention to the actual content.

After years of wondering why I felt so much less productive with Word than I used to be with WP 5.2 I came across LyX and rediscovered the joy of creating documents instead of processing words. As an added bonus, you get the TeX/LaTeX professional typesetting system to do the heavy lifting and make your content look beautiful. For those of you not familiar with LyX, LaTeX and the venerable TeX, take a look at the Introduction to LyX and explore the rest of the LyX site.

I've compiled Mozilla ~1.1 on a Pentium 133MHz with 40MB ram in about a day.

It's a close thing, though; LyX failed to compile on that machine because the compiler even ran out of swap. (LyX uses a lot of C++.)