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LyX – The Document Processor
- mtrn 11y agoA decade ago, LyX was my gateway to LaTeX. It was really fun to use it to create beautiful documents.
- _yp 11y agoThis 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 11y agoNot 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.
- amichail 11y agoTeXmacs 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.
- kzoo 11y agoTeXmacs 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.
- amichail 11y agoThere 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.
- kzoo 11y agoI'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 :)
- mastazi 11y ago> "[put anything here] is better" if the above sentence is not followed by: > "because [explain reason]" my BS detector state is usually set to 'Red Alert'.
- amichail 11y agoCheck out the video. Also, it's free so why not give it a try?
- detaro 11y agoThe video shows a GUI document editor. From what I've seen of LyX, it is also a GUI document editor, but I couldn't describe relevant differences.
- amichail 11y agoUnlike 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 quality of TeX/LaTeX. In some ways, it is better.
- detaro 11y agoThanks, that's short and easy to understand, without knowing the two programs.
- bachmeier 11y agoIs TeXmacs still being developed? I read that it is largely dead. The website and software haven't been updated in years.
- amichail 11y agoYes, it is still being developed. The latest version is 1.99.4, which was released recently.
- tauchunfall 11y ago>Unlike LyX, TeXmacs actually has WYSIWYG editing. LyX only provides a rough approximation of the output. LyX does not intent to be a WYSIWYG editor. It is a WYSIWYM editor. It is the same as some people prefer Microsoft Word and others prefer Markdown.
- amk_ 11y agoTeXmacs 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.
- chungy 11y agoI 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).
- qznc 11y agoWhat about custom commands? I usually have a dozen custom commands in LaTeX to e.g. typeset specific names.
- amichail 11y agoTeXmacs has visual macros.
- _yy 11y agoNice. It has an WYSIWYG editor for vector graphics. It's confusing as hell, though.
- auxym 11y agoReally 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 11y agoI 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 11y agoFor 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.
- mikegioia 11y agoThis 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?
- zjarek 11y agoIt 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.
- JetSpiegel 11y agoIt's the TeX distribution, it has loads and loads of packages. It's better than having to download single packages on demand.
- 88e282102ae2e5b 11y agoYou 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 11y agoThat 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.
- lwf 11y agoMost of the dependency weight is due to -doc packages. For example, `texlive-latex-extra-doc` is a 325MiB download. Here's a (partial) listing of the dependencies that were automatically selected sorted by download size†: https://www.dropbox.com/s/950vm93v1ncna6x/lyx_synaptic.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/950vm93v1ncna6x/lyx_synaptic.png?d... So you can avoid a lot of your disk space usage by excluding‡ the -doc packages. †: I haven't figured out how to get Synaptic to show estimations of unpacked sizes on a per-package basis ‡: In aptitude, `- .*-doc` I think?
- hisham_hm 11y agoI 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.)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- _yy 11y ago> 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?
- eccstartup 11y agoEvery new LaTeX starter will find LyX powerful. -- me In fact, if you are a researcher of mathematics, you can never submit a PAPER written in LyX. It's a waste of time learning it. But LyX really makes you think you are writing in LaTeX! That's the magic part that attracts most people. This theory also applies to Markdown. You can write something beautiful immediately offline, also with LaTeX support. But, it is only a blogger or diary thing.
- GaiusCoffee 11y agoAs 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?
- ahstilde 11y agoWorry about writing and not about formatting frees up your time to do what matters.
- baruch 11y agoI 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 11y agoAnd then you can use the package Microtype and then the LaTeX output turns into pure buttery smooth readability.
- amelius 11y agoVery 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/
- tonto 11y agoLyX 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
- lmm 11y agoI 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.
- piplgobde 11y agoOh sweet, was looking for something like this, just didn't want to look for it yet. Thanks a bunch.
- contingencies 11y agoI 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- static_noise 11y agoWhile 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.
- baruch 11y agoI 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.
- starky 11y agoI'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 11y agoHow does it remove the benefit of not worrying about formatting?
- kidsil 11y agoLyx 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) :)
- Lethalman 11y agoAlways liked and used LyX, and never looked back. LaTeX is not for humans in my opinion, nobody should ever write LaTeX by hand.
- cripblip 11y agoI 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!
- neotrinity 11y agoI 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 11y agoI'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.
- amelius 11y agoSlightly 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 11y agoIs postscript composable?
- amelius 11y agoPostscript is very much like SVG. I would say it is very composable.
- jdleesmiller 11y ago(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-robots-an-all-girls-first-tech-challenge-team-number-stem4girls https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas-building-r...
- static_noise 11y agoYou 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.
- CDokolas 11y agoI 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
- static_noise 11y agoFYI: They are currently preparing the release for version 2.2 which supports Retina on OSX.