From lyx-users Tue Mar 24 01:30:08 2009 From: stefano franchi Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:30:08 +0000 To: lyx-users Subject: Re: Help for paper about LaTeX/LyX and the meaning of life Message-Id: <15c525ae0903231830l4db418f1y6f51200cd69d2fc6 () mail ! gmail ! com> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=lyx-users&m=123785824304395 MIME-Version: 1 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="--0016e64ec364d229730465d352a3" --0016e64ec364d229730465d352a3 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable 2009/3/23 Steve Litt > 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 thi= ng > > 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 an= d > so > > on, but the LyX site lacks of all of this. > > > > On the other hand, I would like to introduce the WYSIWYM =E2 philosoph= y=E2 > > but, as I'm not a semiologist, I don't know where to find some relevant > > thought (or some =E2 effect quotation=E2 !) 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 la= st > 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 authori= ng > 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 finge= r > paint, that's probably a good indication that what's really needed is pix= el > 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 fo= r > your presentation. > > HTH > > SteveT > > Steve Litt > Recession Relief Package > http://www.recession-relief.US > > Hi Piero, I'm following Steve's suggestion and posting another opinion. I have been using LyX exclusively for the last 4 years, and I came to it from a few years in Framemaker. I used Word before that (since version 1.0...), until it literally ate the first chapter of my dissertation. I hav= e next to zero coding abilities, and I am an academic in the humanities---a skill set that may be pretty close to your audience's, I believe. My reasons for using LyX: * its file format is text-based and human-readable. That guarantees that my files will be readable throughout my career---which I hope will last another few years. Closed-source formats like MS Word, Framemaker, etc. expose you to the whims of their manufacturers. That's not so bad in the private sector, when most of the documents produced are short-lived, but it's crucial in the academia, when you may want to reuse documents, notes, etcetera you have written 20 years ago or more. In my case: Adobe discontinued Framemaker for Linux and for Mac > 10.4 (it requires classic). I now have to keep around (and maintain, monitor, etc.) an old Mac for the sole purpose of reading//converting 10 years worth of Framemaker files. I promised myself I will never make that mistake again. In general, though, academics (when they find a job, that is) can look forward to 40 or 50 year= s of document producing life and need a writing tool that will allow them to retrieve an editable version of a document produced within that span. I think that rules out most if not all closed-source formats. * numer two reason: LyX strikes an ideal compromise between the problems of WYSIWYG processors like Word and company and pure editors+formatter instruction environments like LaTex. Here is what I mean: I would never be able to write anything in Latex, because the formatting instructions are---to me--so intrusive that I cannot focus on the text I write. I suppose people who have grown up with Latex have now developed the ability to ignore all the emph{xxxx}. section{xxx} etc., commands in the file. I cannot. To me a Latex file looks like mumbo-jumbo---I could imagine *retyping* manuscript notes in Latex---I cannot imagine writing directly in Latex as I do in Lyx. (And I am leaving aside footnotes....) On the other hand, Word et company products are too apperance-oriented and become distracting for the opposite reason. I start to worry about the look of what I see on the screen and worry less about the content of what I type. LyX strikes a very good compromise. LyX allows me to see semantic relevant formatting---emphasis, sectioning, footnotes---in a form similar to their final format, and does not show me anything else (to a large extent, that is. Some ERT is unfortunately necessary). So: LyX allows me to write more productively without worrying about the lon= g term viabiity of the documents I produce. On the other hand: * LyX produces glorious output--through LaTex---but that's not that important to me, because no one in my field would accept a LaTex file. In fact I doubt they would even know what it is. And they would not accept a camera-ready file either. Almost everything is retyped or, most likely, imported from Word into a DTP program. I personally enjoy looking at the beautifully formatted output produced by LaTex, but it is a purely narcissistic pleasure. No added benefit there. I believe this to be pretty much the norm in the humanities (after you graduate: your dissertation may be the last piece of writing you control from beginning to end). So, the beauty of the output is neither a plus nor a minus. On the negative side: * We humanists live in a complete Word-centric world. That means publishers expect Word files, co-authors expect Word files, students send you Word files, etcetera. You must become adept at translating back and forth betwee= n Latex/LyX and Word. This is not so difficult if you only care about semantic-relevant formatting, but it still annoying, and it always require some manual clean up. You'll have to learn tricks, preferred paths, etcetera. For instance, Openoffice's converter to Latex tries to recreate not the structure but the visual appearance of the .doc file in Latex, with unbelievably horrible results and completely unreadable "hand-painted" Late= x code. On the other hand, a typical (humanities) .doc file imported in Openoffice, exported to .rtf and converted with rtf2latex requires only minimal cleanup, in my experience.The reverse path is a bit more tricky. * Stability: not so good lately, on my various setups. Used to be better when LyX was less powerful, but I do experience frequent crashes. I almost never lose text, so they are not too annoying. But I would not stress stability so much. * And finally the most annoying problem: customizing environment and classe= s is painfully difficult. This is not a problem for the "official" documents academics produce (talk, papers, books), but it is a huge problems for everything else. And we (or at least I) produce a lot of other stuff: lecture notes, syllabi, reading notes, slides, letters, etcetera. In these cases the virtues of Latex-controlled formatting become a strait-jacket. I need several lines of rather unforgiving Latex code to change the numberin= g styles of enumerated lists to a format more suited to my lecture notes. Similarly for the sectioning numbering style. Some more code to have comments in a box. And a line to turn the date off. And another few the for bibliography...etcetera, etcetera. I am always afraid I will forget all these tricks, so I end up having the same big, abundantly commented preambl= e for all my file and I comment in or out the portions I do or do not need. As it keeps growing, I will soon become difficult to manage. This is clearl= y not the way to go, and I hope the modules feature recently introduced will improve the situation, especially when documentation on how to write module= s will become simpler to follow. (I must say Steve's recently posted tutorial was a reat help. Thanks!) Cheeers, S. --=20 __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Department of Philosophy Ph: (1) 979 862-2211 Texas A&M University Fax: (1) 979 845-0458 College Station, Texas, USA --0016e64ec364d229730465d352a3--