Alternative to LaTeX?

[Sean Hammond]

On 5/12/06, Sean Hammond <sean.hammond at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes I am familiar with both KILE and LyX. I've never really liked
> them, I prefer to keep it simple and edit my source files in a text
> editor (with syntax highlighting) and run LaTeX or markdown from the
> command line. However, maybe I'll look at them again.

I tried LyX again over the last couple of days and have changed my
mind. It is a very easy to use and beatifully conceived app, that goes
most of the way to achieving LaTeX's goal of allowing the user to
focus on the content and structure and not the style of their
document, while still producing great looking results. It hides the
ugly LaTeX syntax, for example, putting in it's place a mid-way
graphical representation of your document as you type it which I think
works really well. It manages to do this without introducing any of
the 'why won't it just do what I want' problems of word processors. It
also hides having to call LaTeX and BibTeX multiple times.

The buttons and menu fonts look a bit ugly in Ubuntu/GNOME (I'm using
the QT version of LyX, I assume the x-forms version is no better, but
the LyX site promises a possible future GTK version), but the rest of
this system is very pleasant to use once you spend half an hour going
through the tutorial. It's hard to understand why WYSIWYG word
processors are still popular at all when LyX provides such a good
alternative example.

There is one small bug relating to LyX in Ubuntu (breezy at least),
but it's easy to get around:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ttf-indic-fonts/+bug/32210

My favourite thing so far has been the cross-referencing. LyX makes
placing cross-references much easier than plain LaTeX, and then LaTeX
will write 'section x.x on page x' in place of a cross-reference, but
if the thing you're referencing happens to be on the next page it will
write 'section x.x on the next page', and if you happen to
cross-reference to the next page twice on the same page then instead
of repeating the phrase 'on the next page' twice it will use 'on the
following page.'