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Lyx is the answer

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Armando:
Aram : I went through approximately the same route a few years ago when I was working on my Ph.D. I got excited about LyX. It lasted only 2-3 days. Got back to Old MS Word 2003 and other tools I badly needed. (I don't have Indesign btw).

Eóin:
The thing about writing large technical-ish documents is that it's entirely nonlinear. You're skipping back and forth between chapters, editing, adding bits, removing, etc. That makes it impossible to manage document layout midway. There's no point getting all your page breaks just perfect only to add a large paragraph somewhere and find now every page breaks halfway.

Mind you, this talk of LyX has my intrigued. When version 2.0 is out for Windows I'll definitely be giving it a serious test drive, maybe I'll write a mini-review too, but not till after I'm confident I gave it a fair chance.

Armando:
LyX is definitely worth exploring. But as always, it boils down to what exactly you need to do.
E.g.: I needed to closely work with EndNote, and while it was possible to convert my library to libtex etc. it was definitely not a smooth workflow...

Also, the separation of format and content is very nice in theory, but I always found -- to a certain extent -- that format actually helps working with content. That's why we have outliners with outline styles, etc.

superboyac:
I agree, Armando.  I've been looking into it a little more and I think I have to stick to Indesign.  I found this quote:
The learning curve for LaTeX is both deep and broad. In my opinion it's harder to learn than C, C++, Java, Perl and the like. But learn it you must, unless you're willing to accept every LyX default for the document class you've chosen.
--- End quote ---

I don't want to learn a programming language.  And I have to customize my content, i.e., I'm going to start from scratch.  There's just no way I'm going to use a style that someone else created.  I'm far too picky for that.

So now the question is, what can I do to automate Indesign?  The math stuff is the biggest headache.  All of the tools out there work, but they all have an issue here and there.  And the best one is very expensive, even for me.  It's like $700.  I want to use mathtype, but it has weird, minor issues with placing content into Indesign.  Everything else about it is perfect.

superboyac:
Are there any nice gui tools for customizing latex styles?  Does it HAVE to be programmed by hand?  i don't see why someone hasn't done this yet.  It's just a matter of a few parameters.  Fonts, sizes, whitespace...there just isn't that much.  Someone has to have created a tool for it.

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