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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
It is so big because it is based on Latex and its ecosystem, which is on most distributions by default quite large. It will install a lot of Latex packages which you probably won't need right away, but if size isn't a big problem I wouldn't bother with trimming it down.
One of the advantages of Lyx is that it builds on Latex and its extensions, which thanks to tens of years of development is very mature and feature rich. If something that you want to do with Lyx isn't supported you can just use raw (La)tex script. For example I used it for autonumbering of chemical compounds.
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.
I find the interface is less "busy" as a result of giving up some of the constraints of WYSIWYG (e.g. a simple line to mark page breaks rather than drawing a page on the screen). Interestingly older versions of Word (in the Windows 3.1 era) were similar.
Styles are more emphasized - the UI will nudge you away from manually changing the font size of one line and towards defining styles for different things. Word has that functionality but it's not quite front-and-center in the same way.
I use LyX for non-maths. It renders nice-looking PDFs (I use it for my CV (well these days I use Kile instead, but same principle)). It's a pretty marginal choice though honestly.
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.
LyX can also integrate with knitr for embedded R code in your document. That can help enable reproducible research documents, which is not strictly math related: pretty much anything with data and graphs can benefit from that
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.
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.
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) :)
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).
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.
I really do wish I could agree, but sadly I cannot. Let's grant that the last time I tried to put TeXmacs into serious use was two years ago, but I don't see indicators much of it would have changed.
TeXmacs fails at usability right off the bat, even being unfamiliar to those used to Emacs keyboard chords (it's sort of implied in the name to be for that use-case), and I found it a little better after changing it to a CUA mode (I think it was called "GNOME Look and Feel"?). Finding crap in the toolbars and menu was obtuse, or even what all the keyboard shortcuts were. And then there was the fact that it was super-easy to crash and lose all your work in an instant. I found a particularly nasty case where just changing the type of header (chapter, sub-chapter, etc) crashed TeXmacs and caused all further attempts to open the file to crash the program immediately... grr
I would love if TeXmacs improves, or has improved, but I absolutely can't recommend it for serious work. Way too crash-happy, on both Debian and Windows systems. LyX is rock-solid stable, on the other hand (and has fewer "gotchas" due to its lack of WYSYWIG).
TeXmacs and LyX take different approaches to document generation. You cannot say one is better than the other without considering how their respective differences will impact your needs from the program.
There is no reason why anyone should use LyX over TeXmacs in high school or undergraduate classes.
TeXmacs is also better for academia but most universities, conferences, and journals are behind the times... so graduate students and professors are still stuck with LaTeX.
I'm happy TeXmacs works so well for you! For my needs, LyX and LaTeX work better and so I choose to use them. It's nice to see a diversity of software that can be of use for everyone :)
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.)