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List:       lyx-users
Subject:    Re: Help for paper about LaTeX/LyX and the meaning of life
From:       Steve Litt <slitt () troubleshooters ! com>
Date:       2009-03-23 23:48:33
Message-ID: 200903231948.33256.slitt () troubleshooters ! com
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On Monday 23 March 2009 12:07:00 pm Piero Faustini wrote:
> Hello,
>  in a couple of months I have to speak at a conference about computers &
> music/critical editions. I will introduce to a M$Word-enslaved audience the
> great advantages of WYSIWYM (by the way, I'm going to talk about music
> notation software LilyPond too, and the audience will be also
> Finale-enslaved: it's David vs. Goliat).
>
> I'm a musicologist and I'm not a LaTeX/LyX pro so the thing would
> definitely be something much more like a divulgative/ads/propaganda thing
> than a specialized research. For this reason, in order to give the audience
> some "content" rather than advertising, I want to cite some statistics,
> relevant opinions, important projects/books/initiatives based on LyX and so
> on, but the LyX site lacks of all of this.
>
> On the other hand, I would like to introduce the WYSIWYM "philosophy"
> but, as I'm not a semiologist, I don't know where to find some relevant
> thought (or some "effect quotation"!) on the whole
> Content-Form-Structure-and-the-meaning- of-life stuff.
>
> Any help would be apreciated and - if possible - referenced.
>
> Thanks, Piero

Hi Piero,

If you haven't already used the word "WYSIWYM" in your title yet and 
advertised your talk as such, I'd personally use different terminology. I'd 
call it "styles based authoring."

LyX is built from the bottom up to make it easy to use (not necessarily create 
or modify, but use) styles. Either character styles or paragraph styles 
(which we LyXers call "environments").

Styles-based authoring is a must when writing a long document because it 
promotes consistency. I used the character style myEmph about 30 times last 
night, and every one of them looked identical, both in LyX and in the 
produced PDF. I didn't have to say to myself each time "hey, in this book am 
I emphasizing by italicizing, bolding or both? I tell several stories in my 
book, and I like stories to look different from the rest of the text. I don't 
have to, with each new story, ask myself "hey, did I italicize stories, 
indent them, shade them, put a box around them, or some combination?" No, 
every time I tell a story, I just use my Story environment.

The end result is that my book has a consistency unmatched by people who don't 
use styles-based authoring. Be aware that you can do styles-based authoring 
with MS Word, WordPerfect, of if you're a masochist OpenOffice. But it's 
easier in LyX, and LyX also makes it harder to do one-off formatting of 
characters and paragraphs. We LyXers call such one-off formatting "finger 
painting", and the results aren't very good. If one really needs to finger 
paint, that's probably a good indication that what's really needed is pixel 
editor or a vector graphics program.

Some people will tell you LyX is not WYSIWYG. All I know is it's WYSIWYG 
enough that I was able to proofread my book in LyX. A truly non-WYSIWYG would 
require regular recompilation to the finished form to proofread. Wordperfect 
4.x is a non-WYSIWYG example -- an even better one is HTML in a text editor.

Here are some of the reasons I personally use LyX:

* It's rock stable
* It does what you expect it to do
* It turns out VERY good looking text layout
* Its native format is simple to edit with an editor
* Its native format is simple to parse with a program
* Its native format is simple to create with a program
* It supports me with huge community of knowledgeable people
* When I finally write my math book, it will handle equations beautifully

Here are the disadvantages of LyX:

* Creation and modification of custom styles is much harder than MS Word or 
Wordperfect.

If you get ten or twenty more opinions, you'll have a great foundation for 
your presentation.

HTH

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US


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