I’ve been meaning to move away from Word, and toward LaTeX, for a while now. A few weeks ago, I was just starting a new manuscript, so I thought I might as well take the plunge. Someone (I don’t remember who) told me about LyX, a ‘front end’ for LaTeX that, in theory, should make using LaTeX easier.
Why move away from Word? Because it’s a pain in the ass to use the automatic table of contents, figure and table numbering, bibliography, general section/subsection/subsubsection, and equation formatting features in Word to produce an acceptable academic (i.e., boring, not filled with useless chartjunk) manuscript, and I’m writing my dissertation. Which is to say, I will be needing a TOC, a bunch of numbered tables and figures, and various (sub)section/cross-referencing, and bibliography formatting done, and I want it to be easy and convenient. On the down side, almost everyone uses Word, so intentionally moving away could cause some (likely minor) problems, at least when it comes time to collaborate.
Anyway, the obvious choice once you decide to move away from Word is to move toward LaTeX. It’s widespread, the documentation is excellent, and the TOC, figure and table numbering, etc…, are orders of magnitude better than those in Word. It’s the obvious choice. I guess you could use OpenOffice, but that only solves problems with Word I haven’t mentioned here.
I was a bit worried about using a ‘raw’ LaTeX distribution, though I can’t now recall exactly why. I suppose I wanted to maximize both user-friendliness (i.e., WYSIWYG-iness) and all the formatting issues simultaneously. So I downloaded LyX.
It was easy enough to download and install the basic program, but it was less than simple to get the aspell spellchecker or, more importantly, various ‘extra’ format article/citation/reference formats to work.
The spell checker didn’t end up taking too long to figure out. It just required some extra downloading and copying of various files. Easy, but it’s stupid that the spell checker doesn’t install with the main program. Installing new LaTeX classes is not so easy with LyX, though. Technically, it’s easy to get the LaTeX distribution to recognize a new class, but it’s much less easy to get LyX to do so, as it requires an additional ‘.layout’ file that tells LyX how to present the .cls/.sty in the editor and how to process the ‘.lyx’/.tex file and make a pretty pdf.
If you’re not familiar with LaTeX, of course, not much of that makes sense to you. The point is that, with a plain old LaTeX distribution, it’s quite simple to copy three or four files to the right directly and then tell the TeX program to look around for new stuff. It’s substantially less simple to do that, plus figure out, with poor help files and worse online documentation, how to tell LyX what to do with the copied files. The point distilled still more: LaTeX takes n steps to use; LyX takes n+m, where m >= n.
I meant to write this post immediately after getting so frustrated with LyX that I gave it up (forever), but it’s been a week or so now, and I no longer feel the urge to explain in more detail what’s so bad about LyX. I gave it up and have been teaching myself how to use plain old LaTeX. It’s better in pretty much every respect.
To use LyX is to add a completely unecessary middleman,though I’ll admit that it has a few nice features: the equation editor is immensely better than that in Word (faint praise, I know) and the bibliography/cross-referencing works really well. But these two features don’t even begin to make up for the fact that introducing a new document class requires as much extra work as it does, especially when simply downloading and copying four files to the proper directories gets standard LaTeX to use a new class flawlessly.
A big part of the point of using LaTeX is to avoid worrying about typesetting/formatting issues and focus on the content of your writing. Trying to get the JASA LaTeX class (and associated files) to work with LyX required many hours of worrying about formatting and typesetting, and I never got it to work right. In a sense it was worse than that makes it sound, as the formatting I was worrying about wasn’t even entirely the formatting of the final document, but also the formatting of the document in LyX itself.
As mentioned, I gave up on LyX. I exported the draft I was working on as a .tex file, edited it in TeXShop (since LyX had, conveniently, thrown in some farewell garble, as it were), and everything’s been working fine ever since. LaTeX takes a bit of time up front to learn the basics, but the basics are really quite simple, and the results are wonderful. LyX takes more time up front, and the results are frustrating and unsatisfying.
On the off chance that [search engine] crawls by here and some wayward soul thinking of using LaTeX (I’m so very tired of typing it that way, but how supercilious can I be if just type ‘latex’ and you think I’m writing about rubber trees and allergies? I mean, one of the benefits of using LaTeX is feeling superior, right?) happens by after a [search engine] search, and they are dissuaded from using LyX, then maybe, just maybe, this week’s feeble attempt to keep my blog from finally dying will have been worth it.