Any TeX-perts out there? (was: Re: [PLUG] Struggling with OpenOffice

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Thu Aug 8 20:02:28 UTC 2002


On 8 Aug 2002, AthlonRob wrote:

> From what I've heard, TeX is *the* way to write any kind of technical
> papers.  I haven't used it at all thus far, though.  Slackware has a
> whole seperate diskset for it, for some reason... I've never installed
> it. 
> 
> As an engineering student, I think a TeX class of some sort would be a
> good thing to have under my belt!  I'll bet you could get a lot of folks
> to participate in something like that if they were aware of it.

  LyX is your friend! Dean and I had a very good exchange on this last year.

  I use LyX for my articles and reports (that don't need a letterhead or
someone's specific formats). I can report that from my experience it has a
10-minute learning curve. That's the time it takes to read the tutorial.

  After that, there are issues that come up, but the online users guide,
reference manual and mail list are absolutely superb. LyX is, hands down,
the only GUI document processor I can more than tolerate. I actually like
the silly thing!

  I've put in equations, tables and figures with no problem. Sometimes it
was a problem to get them looking as I wanted, but then I was taught how to
do it. Herb Voss in Germany has a huge web site of LaTeX code ready to drop
into LyX that does almost everything but the shopping and laundry.

  Because you don't have to do anything about formatting output, you sit and
create quickly. Mark headings and lists from the pull-down menus and that's
all the effort it takes. And the output is stunning! It is, after all,
professionally typeset and that makes a tremendous positive impression on
those that read it.

  There are also styles for various and sundry scientific journals and many
different theses/dissertations from different universities.

  <http://www.lyx.org>

Rich





More information about the PLUG mailing list