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List:       lyx-users
Subject:    Re: Help for paper about LaTeX/LyX and the meaning of life
From:       stefano franchi <franchi () philosophy ! tamu ! edu>
Date:       2009-03-24 1:30:08
Message-ID: 15c525ae0903231830l4db418f1y6f51200cd69d2fc6 () mail ! gmail ! com
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2009/3/23 Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>

> 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 â  philosophyâ
> > but, as I'm not a semiologist, I don't know where to find some relevant
> > thought (or some â  effect quotationâ  !) 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
>
>
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 have
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 years
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 long
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 between
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" Latex
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 classes
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 numbering
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 preamble
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 clearly
not the way to go, and I hope the modules feature recently introduced will
improve the situation, especially when documentation on how to write modules
will become simpler to follow. (I must say Steve's recently posted tutorial
was a reat help. Thanks!)

Cheeers,

S.


-- 
__________________________________________________
Stefano Franchi
Department of Philosophy           Ph:   (1) 979 862-2211
Texas A&M University                 Fax: (1) 979 845-0458
College Station, Texas, USA


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