Introduction
When doing documents using general-purpose word-processing software like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, you are capable of doing just about every formatting you’d feel like and add just the type of content you would like, where you like. These editors are fine for most purposes and they are indeed often quite powerful yet easy to use. Also doing math and physics in such editors is surely fine, because these applications are for most uses very easy and intuitive and also rather fast to work with. With all this freedom, people tend to format documents, sometimes a lot, even though it’s just basic content, instead of relying on the default settings because, hey, they’re just dull. Having to even consider how to format a document, is what LyX is all not about!

LyX calls itself a WYSIWYM-editor (What You See Is What You Mean) which will get explained further below, while OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word are WYSIWYG-editors (What You See Is What You Get).
The thing is that most documents do not need all this styling and formatting. In fact, wouldn’t it be nice to always just get right to the content? Wouldn’t it be right if the default styling and formatting were just plain and beauty, and wouldn’t it be nice with an editor built for equations and formulas? LyX is giving the powerful LaTeX-suite a user friendly and intuitive interface.
Matthias Ettrich, the computer-scientist who founded the KDE-project which today is one of the major desktop-environments for Linux and Unix in general, started developing what eventually became LyX back in 1995. It is released under the GPL-license.

Expectations
Knowing that this application is using the mighty powers of LaTeX and knowing it has a 10+ year history, and also knowing who’s behind is also behind one of the most user friendly desktop-suites for Linux and Unix in general, I expect this application to be very user friendly (perhaps even a bit too much, like too many wizards?). I expect the resulting documents to be of a very high quality due to the LaTeX underneath and I expect it to be rock-solid stable.

First impression
LyX starts really fast (in less than 2 seconds), compared to what I’m used to from OpenOffice.org which takes around 30 seconds to start (can be reduced to maybe 5 seconds with the sys tray-quick starter which in return eats quite a piece of RAM while just sitting there) is nothing.

The first time you start LyX you will be greeted with an introduction to the program, explaining the major differences between it and other word-processing software. This page highly recommends you go read the documentation, which I must agree with - you will see that this program is not intuitive at first, but actually takes a little while to get used to. If you don’t feel like reading a few pages of tutorial, you might as well not start at all.
Well, I guess I should just start by digging right into it, starting with the “New document”-button.

Functionality
So I start typing. The first thing I notice is that hitting space multiple times does nothing! Hitting enter multiple times does… nothing. If I make a new line and use the arrow-up key to get back up, that one empty line I just made is removed!

What is this?!

Well, as I pointed out before, this is a WYSIWYM-editor, not a WYSIWYG-editor. LyX simply tried to tell me (through silence) that what I really want is not a lot of blank space in the middle of everything. Why? Adding all that blank space should be none of your concern. You should just consider the content and that’s it. You shouldn’t think about indenting stuff with spaces and you shouldn’t care about making extra space for a title. That’s not the LaTeX-way and therefore not the LyX-way.

This way of thinking is pretty different from that in general word-processing software, but adapting to this style is not very hard. It’s just a matter of letting go and let LyX do the formatting. Of course, you have some level of access to the parameters LyX uses to format your document, but if you’re like me, you’ll notice that the defaults are actually very nice indeed and needs only minor tweaking like perhaps changing the margins a little (they’re very large per default) and as I’m European, I also need to change the paper-format to A4.
Now, the first thing you should do after creating a new document, is go through the “Document > Settings”. These settings define what styles will be used in your document, based on the type of document you want to do. You have some predefined “Document classes” tailored for generic purposes. You are most likely going to use the “Article”-style most of the time, which is very fit for most kind of shorter documents, as it doesn’t give too unnecessary blank-space before and after titles and doesn’t add a stand-alone title-page on front and before each new chapter begins, unless you tell it to.

There’s also styles for books, letters, slides and many more. Even more document-classes are available around the web, but installing them is not very intuitive - besides, as I stated already, the default classes are usually just fine. You still don’t have a lot of choice, but don’t confuse that with less power. The “Document > Settings” is simple and only has few options, but it’s pretty easy to understand. Some choices you’ll not understand unless you already know LaTeX, but try stick with the defaults for starters?

First document
Instead of doing a long description on how to create a document using LyX, a document using various sorts of equations, a lot of mathematical symbols and all that, I did a movie on that instead. The movie is saved in the flash-format and it has a size of 1.3 megabyte and contains lots of comments to make what I do easily reproducible and to explain why I do what I do.

Click here to view the movie in your browser.

The major conclusions from the video is that some of the features I think will be used the most by a lot of people, are almost hidden for to me unknown reasons. Even though there are menu-items and icons for almost all features, the shortcuts for them are either not told at all, or only one of them (there’s often two, and the one shown, if one is shown, not always the shortest), so unless you look the shortcuts up all the time, you might end up doing stuff an only near-optimal way. For instance, there’s two shortcut for making a fraction, but this isn’t even explained, although this is probably the most used by people doing math (the shortcuts are either typing \frac or hitting Alt+m f). The thing is that virtually everything does have short-cuts, but finding out what they are is not intuitive.

Even though, creating a pretty-looking document does not take long. You can see the resulting file which was created during the video above, exported to PDF (54,3 kilobyte):

Click here to view the resulting document.

Stability
I did not show this during the video, but for unknown reasons, I have made the application go down a few times (something like 5 times in 10 hours of usage, sadly I didn’t count neither times nor hours). None of the times I’ve been able to figure out the reason as to why it suddenly went down (it didn’t crash like most other applications do with a crash-message, it just disappeared). Fortunately, LyX does backups all the time, so the next time you open LyX, it offers to recover using the latest backup, which is maybe a half row in an equation or three words back in a sentence. I haven’t yet tried a not 100% successful recovery. Compare that to OpenOffice.org which per default does backups every 15 minutes - I can write a lot in 15 minutes!

Activity and bug-squashing
As with so many open-source-projects, this one is based on volunteer work and there seems to be some pretty active people behind. When in the publicly available development-ftp-server it’s possible to see a pattern that with a few months in between, a new development-version is released. When looking at their Bugzilla bug-tracker, it shows that whenever a bug is actually found, the response is rather quick. There were only a few confirmed bugs which hadn’t been fixed yet, but with the active development it seems like fixing them is going to happen.

Error messages
Actually making it produce any error messages is an accomplishment on its own. Whenever I try do something that doesn’t make sense, it tend to just ignore it, or it tries to do what it believes I want. For instance, I try to insert some graphics into the document and I pick a shell-script as my graphics (which makes no sense at all). When trying to load the graphics it just tells, in place of the graphics, that loading the graphics wasn’t successful. I also try load some genuine graphics and set the width to be negative. It just removes the minus-sign without telling me and the image shows up fine. When I try to load a shell-script instead of a LyX-file, a warning does tell me though that the file was not a LyX-document and thus cannot be opened like that, but this is the first warning-pop up I’ve seen thus far.

Third-party support
The “Import”-menu was probably what shook me the most: For some reason it says it’s able to import LaTeX-files, Plain Text and Microsoft Word-documents! Now I can think of dozens of formats they could’ve spent their time on developing an import-filter for, but… Well, they must have their reasons.

Anyway, I don’t have Microsoft Word, so I use OpenOffice.org to export one of my old math-assignments to Microsoft Word-format for it to be imported into LyX to see how well it handles that. The import of the text itself went fine. Even the danish characters in the document get imported problem-free. There’s a lot of strange tags all around though, and in place of the formulas, there’s black boxes telling me that the graphics could not be found. It might be different if the file was actually done in Microsoft Word to start off with and the equations actually came from the Equation-editor instead of OpenOffice.org Math, so if you can test how well it actually does imports from Microsoft Word, please tell me how it went. The screen shot to the right shows my somewhat successful importing-attempt.

It exports to DVI, an old versions of itself, LaTeX, PDF, plaintext, Postscript, and Custom for custom export-filters.

Integration with the desktop environment
It is able to paste in text from other applications and other instances of itself, but it’s not even able to properly copy-paste formulas from another instance of itself (if I have two LyX-windows open at the same time). It will do it, but it will only paste it, if you explicitly tell it to only do the import as clear text which means the formula will get pasted as clear text LaTeX, which isn’t very useful when using LyX.

When it comes to the theme of the application (icons, fonts, colors) it uses the system-theme rather well. The icons are LyX own I think, but the colors are the same I use for the rest of my system, and the same applies to the menu-fonts.

Translation
Even though the program is as old as it is, the amounts of translations are not very impressive. It has been fully translated to only some major world-languages. Some of the major languages with complete translations are French, Spanish, German and Italian, while other major languages like Hebrew and Arabic are not availble (Chinese, Japanese and Korean are available through an external project).

Spell-checking
It has spell-checking and it uses the systems built-in dictionaries. It doesn’t do automatic underlining, but takes the more classical approach of the user manually having to run a spell-checker, which goes through each unrecognized word, one by one.

Documentation
There’s a really thorough documentation bundled. If you have any questions whatsoever, the answer is there for sure. It is very well written as well. It includes dozens of tips added by various readers, so even if there isn’t an official way to do a specific task (LyX only implements a subset of LaTeX features), a work-around might be in the documentation regardless as you are able to paste in LaTeX-code in special containers. It’s not a very pretty approach, but it sure gets the job done.

Future development
The road map for the future is rather short and not very extensive. It’s mostly stuff like tweak the file-format, make import-filter do this and such. There’s also a list of features they would like implemented, which is much longer, but also unspecific as to when it will be done (if ever).

Conclusion
The application is really fast, especially when compared to general purpose word-processing software. Even though you are somewhat locked in when it comes to the styling of the document, the resulting documents are nicely formatted. For doing maths or physics which require a lot of symbols and formulas, the application is especially well-fit with easy-to-navigate menus and shortcuts for everything, although finding out what these shortcuts are and what you actually should use and what you need, can be a bit tedious. There’s a very good documentation though which makes up for that.
The application is not intuitive at first if you have used general-purpose word-processing software before, such as OpenOffice.org Writer or Microsoft Word, as the principles are different. In LyX you define a style and then LyX takes care of the formatting, with you then not having to care about formatting and styling at all, which is definitely a time saver. You loose some formatting-freedom yes, but for most documents you don’t need this freedom.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.