
LyX – The Document Processor - vmorgulis
http://www.lyx.org/
======
hisham_hm
I love LyX!

The end-result of good looking LaTeX documents, without (most of [1]) the
pain.

I recently adapted a colleague's document from LaTeX and it was simply easier
to redraw a slightly complex table in LyX than to understand the table markup.
I think he'd be disheartened to learn how fast it was to produce the table.

Writing math is also a no-brainer compared to LaTeX. Whenever my LaTeX-using
colleagues see me writing stuff in LyX, and the screen is filled with
semantics rules that basically look just like they'll look in the final PDF,
they go "yeah, I really have to check out LyX some time..."

Mostly they end up never checking out LyX and sticking with LaTeX, to their
loss, but I've managed to convert a few people over!

([1] the remaining pain is related to dealing with conference and journal
style files, which often have quirks in LaTeX, and adding LyX on top sometimes
demands an extra layer of adaptation.)

~~~
_yy
> I recently adapted a colleague's document from LaTeX and it was simply
> easier to redraw a slightly complex table in LyX than to understand the
> table markup. I think he'd be disheartened to learn how fast it was to
> produce the table.

Can't you even import some of those?

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_yp
This is one of the finest pieces of open source software that I've ever seen.
The documentation is very good and even succeeds at making LaTeX accessible to
non-technical people.

I've been using it for years for pretty much everything that other people
would use LibreOffice or Office for.

~~~
colanderman
Not many pieces of OSS are on my list of "would continue to use even if all
competing commercial offerings were open-sourced". LyX is on that list, beside
Inkscape and Postgres.

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contingencies
I too use LyX a lot but it is a pig upon which we should not place too much in
the way of lipstick. While it has all the power of LaTeX, it only succeeds in
hiding the complexity some of the time and does introduce its own issues. To
assert that it is easy to use is simply betraying personal experience limited
to a relatively simple use case. Multilingual issues mean manual configuration
of XeTeX + font hacks + painstaking per-phrase language markup for simple
stuff like including quotes from foreign languages. It's often necessary to
manually fiddle your LaTeX preamble, or drop little raw LaTeX boxes in the
middle of your text. Seemingly basic features on other authoring platforms
(timelines come to mind) are virtually impossible in LyX. That said, it's the
only way to author some documents, is highly reliable, and well worth
supporting as a project.

~~~
static_noise
While LyX is not perfect and does not wholly encapsulate LaTeX in my
experience it provides 99% of the functionality for 90% of the people.

While it complicates things a bit when dealing with custom or non-standard
LaTeX layouts, it makes writing so much easier and more efficient.

One way to get the best of both worlds is to write the document in LyX until
it is almost done (except some weird layout things for journals) and then
export it to LaTeX and give it the final touches there.

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jdleesmiller
(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of
[https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com), which is an online LaTeX
editor with a rich text view that was inspired in part by LyX.)

I've written several papers in LyX, and I think it was a great way to get
started with LaTeX. The main trouble I had with it was collaboration --- since
it was a desktop app that not many (possibly none?) of my colleagues used, I
couldn't really get anyone else to contribute, except by asking for them to
provide text and then mostly manually inserting it back in to LyX.

In the end, they convinced me to just write LaTeX source into an EtherPad,
which was fine once I got used to it. And Overleaf is basically just a
refinement of this idea.

I hope that Overleaf's rich text mode also helps people climbs LaTeX's
notoriously steep learning curve, and I hope it saves them from some of the
collaboration problems that I had when I was doing the same. We have some
evidence that it is helping, such as these high school students who somehow
managed to write a 300 page report in LaTeX using Overleaf [1]. I think that's
amazing!

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas-
building-r...](https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas-building-
robots-an-all-girls-first-tech-challenge-team-number-stem4girls)

~~~
static_noise
You can (on windows at least) install a portable version of LyX onto a
directory on your USB stick or network folder, give it to your colleagues and
they just run it from there.

LyX supports change tracking similar to other wordprocessors so you can see
who edited/added/deleted which part of the document.

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starky
I've never liked LyX, it removes the benefit of not worrying about formatting
that LaTeX is made for, while still being significantly harder to use than
Word. It fills an awkward space between WYSIWYG and markup without the
benefits of either.

I eventually settled on Texmaker as it incorporates all the features to allow
me to write documents quickly, while still maintaining the LaTeX way of doing
things.

~~~
gugagore
How does it remove the benefit of not worrying about formatting?

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auxym
Really love lyx. Used plain latex for a while, but for me LyX really hits the
sweetspot between writing latex in vim and word-like WYSIWYG.

Lyx and Zotero+LyZ made for a quite fine thesis workflow. LyX files are plain
text and thus easily managed in git.

~~~
Apaze
I disagree about the git part. Or at least mine is not configured as it
should. Lyx, by default at least, wrap the line to the 80-char limits which
make a change (of a removed -or added- coma -or word-) several breakline due
to the shift. Which makes the `git diff` almost unreadable and the change hard
to find.

~~~
spdegabrielle
For a single person document git is probably overkill - but due to the fact
hit is available everywhere it _is_ an easy way to have a history of your
changes.

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baruch
I used LyX mostly in my university year after Word crashed and took down a
glorious formula document I needed for a test. LyX was better for editing math
and the documents looked gorgeous without me needing to know what made them so
nice.

I then started to hack on it and did some code (InsetGraphics), most likely
since then that code was replaced already but it was fun and the community
around it was amazing.

I'm still using it from time to time to create great looking documents when
corporate doesn't require an official Word template.

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Lethalman
Always liked and used LyX, and never looked back. LaTeX is not for humans in
my opinion, nobody should ever write LaTeX by hand.

~~~
cripblip
I was introduced to latex by a German student in my telecoms lab. Armed with a
handful of examples I wrote all my papers from then on in Tex. The thing that
really struck me, I concentrated on the content not the formatting. Word etc
require so much fiddling to get it looking right, it takes energy away from
actually writing your paper!

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mikegioia
This looks interesting, but the Ubuntu stable release is asking me to download
1.2GB of packages! Holy crap. I'd like to try this out but why on earth is
this bigger than the actual distro?

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
You can try adding --no-install-recommends which gets it down to 55 MB, though
I balked when it asked me if I wanted to install unauthenticated packages.

~~~
lwf
That sounds like a local caching issue — an `apt-get update` first usually
fixes that for me.

Or, you have a third-party APT repository specified in
`/etc/apt/sources.list{,.d/*}` that you didn't install the keys for.

Or the NSA.

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GaiusCoffee
As a layperson, why would I use this rather than just open MS Word? Is there
any benefit for me, considering I'm not writing Math?

~~~
baruch
I like the look of a LaTeX document better than that of a Word document by a
mile.

You can probably get a Word document to look great as well but in LaTeX it
happens by default. It actually provides you proper typographical advantages
without you needing to know anything about them.

~~~
CarVac
And then you can use the package Microtype and then the LaTeX output turns
into pure buttery smooth readability.

~~~
amelius
Very interesting.

Here's a page showing the effect of using microtype, and some tips of usage:
[1]

[1]
[http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/](http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/)

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neotrinity
I have had decent experience using
[https://www.sharelatex.com/](https://www.sharelatex.com/)

I compile my cv using latex. And once I had to make a few changes to my cv. So
I used their service from my office. It worked pretty well for my use case.

PS: I have no affiliation with them.

~~~
cmrx64
I've used sharelatex when collaborating on a small paper. It's REALLY useful
to live-edit a latex document in parallel with other people, and see changes
live. The chat being able to embed latex is super useful.

Besides that, though, it's just OK.

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kidsil
Lyx helped me type everything during my lectures & seminars in the University.
I was typing about 30%-40% faster than anyone else was writing (including
complex equations).

At the end of the Semester, my notes were the only searchable ones (not to
mention easiest to read) :)

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amelius
Slightly offtopic. I've always wondered why LaTeX doesn't value
"composability". When putting some environment inside another environment,
it's always a surprise whether it works or not (or even, whether it compiles).

At least, that is my experience.

~~~
spdegabrielle
Is postscript composable?

~~~
amelius
Postscript is very much like SVG. I would say it is very composable.

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amichail
TeXmacs is better. Check out this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlcqGRv7xhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlcqGRv7xhc)

Unlike LyX, TeXmacs actually has WYSIWYG editing. LyX only provides a rough
approximation of the output.

Moreover, the real-time typesetter in TeXmacs rivals the output of TeX/LaTeX.
In some ways, it is better.

~~~
amk_
TeXmacs is great--you can precisely and effortlessly write equations (and
tables) that would be a huge pain to generate in Lyx, Word, and especially
LaTeX. Jupyter-style embedding of live Python/Octave/Matlab (and more?)
consoles into the document is pretty awesome, too.

That said, I never use it for a document I'm going to send to collaborators
unless they are really onboard with it first.

1\. Emacs keybindings/window layout. If you aren't used to thinking in buffers
and don't know which is the meta key, this can be very confusing.

2\. TeXmacs uses TeX, not LaTeX, in the backend, though there are
export/import commands. Makes it necessary to do some wrangling to get
documents to match prescribed formats.

~~~
amichail
TeXmacs doesn't use TeX. Rather, it has its own real-time typesetting engine
that produces output of quality comparable to TeX.

~~~
amk_
Ah, turns out it only uses TeX fonts and implements its own typesetter.

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static_noise
FYI: They are currently preparing the release for version 2.2 which supports
Retina on OSX.

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piplgobde
Oh sweet, was looking for something like this, just didn't want to look for it
yet.

Thanks a bunch.

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CDokolas
I think LyX is a great idea, but I had a couple of problems with it:

1\. Support for the Greek language is not good

2\. Found it difficult to manage and create my own templates

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mtrn
A decade ago, LyX was my gateway to LaTeX. It was really fun to use it to
create beautiful documents.

