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Lyx is the answer

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superboyac:
I've been writing a lot the past year.  You guys might be familiar with my frustrations with Word and styles and all that.  Well, I think Lyx is the answer for me.  I haven't gotten my hands dirty with it yet, but I've been reading about it and it seems like it's exactly what I'm looking for.

The other reason why I'm just about convinced is because of the intro/tutorial that's included with the program.  It's very clear that they want to make writing and styling very easy.  Not like Word, and not like any other application I've seen.

I've been using Indesign for a side business involving equations and text and graphics.  Indesign is ok, but still a little too much fiddling around for me.  And like any of the big name software, there are a lot of features that are implemented in a weird way.  I'm going to give Lyx a try and I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it a lot.

Word sucks. Extremely unstable.  It's been two fucking decades and it still can't do bullets and numbering without making you nervous.  All the experts say avoid most of the interesting features because it corrupts the document.  And it does.  i remember ignoring that advice, and my documents got corrupted almost immediately.

And I love that Lyx can do math stuff.  Man, Indesign has some pretty annoying issues with math stuff.  You have to bring it in from something like Mathtype, and then it doesn't display nicely if it's a Mac, and it creates an extra step if you want to change anything.  You have to go back to mathtype, bring it back in, etc.  So it's nice to have it in one place.

I'm also going to be interested in automating document creation based on databases and such.  but that's in the future.

So Word is out.  Indesign is out, most likely.  I never was a fan of Quark.  I've had experience with Scientific Notation's Scientific Workplace package, but it's outdated now and not as nice as Lyx.  (This is all Latex stuff, for those of you wondering).  I was never a huge fan of Latex because of it's unix-like environment, but it has matured into nice applications like Lyx now.  And it's free.  Crazy.  I would actually prefer something like Lyx that I can pay for, so I can get support more easily if necessary.  But there doesn't seem to be an equivalent out there.  It's ok, Lyx sounds like it's just right.

I'm pretty excited about it, actually.

Curt:
And I love that Lyx can do math stuff. 
-superboyac (March 15, 2011, 03:48 PM)
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The other way around, I would say. LYX is a math editor than also can type words and stuff.

Well, what I would say is, that the included CygWin has made some computers unstable.

superboyac:
And I love that Lyx can do math stuff. 
-superboyac (March 15, 2011, 03:48 PM)
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The other way around, I would say. LYX is a math editor than also can type words and stuff.

Well, what I would say is, that the included CygWin has made some computers unstable.

-Curt (March 15, 2011, 05:05 PM)
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Would you say it's anything to worry about?  I'm not saying it will never ever do anything wrong.  Do I have to worry about doing a bunch of work, and then losing it?  It doesn't seem to be the case.

Edvard:
Lyx is great for what it says it's for, which may be exactly what you're looking for.
If you can get the concept of WYSIWYM, you're more than halfway there.

The only instability I've discovered so far is when that one section looks almost right, and I just KNOW I can fix it in the Class file...  

Long story shortSave yourself from the get-go by picking a Class that looks most like what you envision your end-product to be, and work with it.
Save tweaking up your own for when you have more experience and a few hours to waste :P

superboyac:
Save yourself from the get-go by picking a Class that looks most like what you envision your end-product to be, and work with it.
Save tweaking up your own for when you have more experience and a few hours to waste. 
-Edvard (March 15, 2011, 06:39 PM)
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Well...I plan to be extremely picky about my styling.  That's the whole point.  It's not like any other program makes styling a breeze.

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