Trying a New Word Processor: LyX
Oct. 19th, 2016 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebFor various reasons, I deliberately do not use any Microsoft products at home. This is no hardship for me (except for Excel).
Unfortunately, the open-source Linux word processors I've tried, Open Office and Libre Office, are both Word clones.
What I want is something that takes all the best ideas from previously developed word processors, which for some reason Microsoft refuses to do. [Though I will admit that I do like that Microsoft does use mouses (or touchpads or whatever) and also still has short-cut keys so you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard for quickly doing things you've done a million times before.]
Reveal codes
I miss reveal codes from WordPerfect 5.1, for example. You know how whenever you delete something wrong or copy and paste something from another source, your computer sometimes decides you want some wacky font instead of the one you're using for everything else? With reveal codes, you can find that wacky-font command and then delete it. Without it, you have to select everything, and maybe some extra just to make sure, and then try to change it all back to match, remembering your font, your font size, un-bolding it, or whatever.
Equations
I also miss the way Macs do equations. You can easily do wacky things like subscripts of subscripts (instead of just making them a smaller font than the main subscript and hoping that's good enough). Or fractions inside of fractions.
Characters
I also miss the easy way to make tildes and other modifications to letters on Macs. For a tilde, you just type Ctrl-n, then the letter you want the tilde on top of, usually an n. In some applications, no matter how much I scroll around through their options of weird characters, I can't find an x-bar. Grr.
Mostly I don't care. I'm no longer typing for zoology professors, so I don't have to do tricky things anymore. Unless I'm typing Spanish or other foreign languages, and I found typeit.org for that.
But finally I decided to try something new (to me). I've read good things about LaTeX, but it has a steep learning curve. And so I'm first trying LyX, which is a wysiwyg-ish version.
Tutorial
Under the help tab in the software is an introduction and a tutorial, both of which I've now read over the last three days.
Graphic design versus going with the flow
Okay, there are two ways to go about designing documents. One is to specify exactly how everything should look, down to individual pixels. This is what we try to do on paper and with typewriters and is important for things like brochures which, after you fold them, need to have certain things on each panel on both sides.
However, this does not work well on the Internet where you have no idea what size window people will have open let alone how big a screen they will have, etc. Some people resist this and try to make everything look just how they want and try to force everyone to have their windows big or it just won't work.
But the best practice is considered to be to use a design that can work in many situations. So, for example, instead of saying you want the title to be in 18 point boldfaced font, you just say you want it to be in "Title" font, which is big and bold. You can specify the defaults you want, but the viewer can change these.
So, when you're coding html, it's best to designate the function of everything as you go and then separately specify the style of those things. So everything is a title or a paragraph or an equation, and you make make up your own styles for other things.
LyX is more like html than like Word. First you decide what you're writing (such as a letter, a book, or an article). That determines what styles are available (such as signature, title, or bibliography).
So the advantage is that you're thinking in terms of function instead of in terms of typesetting. You don't have to remember what size you decided to make subtitles, you just remember that you're using subtitles.
Even if you like this idea, the bad part is that you are relying on someone else to figure out all the styles you need. For example, on letters, I still can't figure out how to include my title under my name in the signature block. Surely that's possible--I didn't check the documentation or google anything yet. But I don't actually know, and there's definitely an avenue for frustration here.
Still, there is no sudden changing of fonts that you don't understand--everything of the same function is the same style as each other.
Equations and characters
Equations and characters are a lot like on Macs. Woot!
And you have automatic numbering of things like footnotes and equations so you can stick one in the middle without having to find all the other ones. And you can make automatic tables of contents. And you can go directly to specific sections rather than having to scroll or find the right search terms.
Export
You can't export it to Word, so if that's required for a job application or other sharing, this is no good. However, you can export it to PDF.
Conclusion
I'm going to try using LyX for NaNoWriMo.
Unfortunately, the open-source Linux word processors I've tried, Open Office and Libre Office, are both Word clones.
What I want is something that takes all the best ideas from previously developed word processors, which for some reason Microsoft refuses to do. [Though I will admit that I do like that Microsoft does use mouses (or touchpads or whatever) and also still has short-cut keys so you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard for quickly doing things you've done a million times before.]
Reveal codes
I miss reveal codes from WordPerfect 5.1, for example. You know how whenever you delete something wrong or copy and paste something from another source, your computer sometimes decides you want some wacky font instead of the one you're using for everything else? With reveal codes, you can find that wacky-font command and then delete it. Without it, you have to select everything, and maybe some extra just to make sure, and then try to change it all back to match, remembering your font, your font size, un-bolding it, or whatever.
Equations
I also miss the way Macs do equations. You can easily do wacky things like subscripts of subscripts (instead of just making them a smaller font than the main subscript and hoping that's good enough). Or fractions inside of fractions.
Characters
I also miss the easy way to make tildes and other modifications to letters on Macs. For a tilde, you just type Ctrl-n, then the letter you want the tilde on top of, usually an n. In some applications, no matter how much I scroll around through their options of weird characters, I can't find an x-bar. Grr.
Mostly I don't care. I'm no longer typing for zoology professors, so I don't have to do tricky things anymore. Unless I'm typing Spanish or other foreign languages, and I found typeit.org for that.
But finally I decided to try something new (to me). I've read good things about LaTeX, but it has a steep learning curve. And so I'm first trying LyX, which is a wysiwyg-ish version.
Tutorial
Under the help tab in the software is an introduction and a tutorial, both of which I've now read over the last three days.
Graphic design versus going with the flow
Okay, there are two ways to go about designing documents. One is to specify exactly how everything should look, down to individual pixels. This is what we try to do on paper and with typewriters and is important for things like brochures which, after you fold them, need to have certain things on each panel on both sides.
However, this does not work well on the Internet where you have no idea what size window people will have open let alone how big a screen they will have, etc. Some people resist this and try to make everything look just how they want and try to force everyone to have their windows big or it just won't work.
But the best practice is considered to be to use a design that can work in many situations. So, for example, instead of saying you want the title to be in 18 point boldfaced font, you just say you want it to be in "Title" font, which is big and bold. You can specify the defaults you want, but the viewer can change these.
So, when you're coding html, it's best to designate the function of everything as you go and then separately specify the style of those things. So everything is a title or a paragraph or an equation, and you make make up your own styles for other things.
LyX is more like html than like Word. First you decide what you're writing (such as a letter, a book, or an article). That determines what styles are available (such as signature, title, or bibliography).
So the advantage is that you're thinking in terms of function instead of in terms of typesetting. You don't have to remember what size you decided to make subtitles, you just remember that you're using subtitles.
Even if you like this idea, the bad part is that you are relying on someone else to figure out all the styles you need. For example, on letters, I still can't figure out how to include my title under my name in the signature block. Surely that's possible--I didn't check the documentation or google anything yet. But I don't actually know, and there's definitely an avenue for frustration here.
Still, there is no sudden changing of fonts that you don't understand--everything of the same function is the same style as each other.
Equations and characters
Equations and characters are a lot like on Macs. Woot!
And you have automatic numbering of things like footnotes and equations so you can stick one in the middle without having to find all the other ones. And you can make automatic tables of contents. And you can go directly to specific sections rather than having to scroll or find the right search terms.
Export
You can't export it to Word, so if that's required for a job application or other sharing, this is no good. However, you can export it to PDF.
Conclusion
I'm going to try using LyX for NaNoWriMo.