LyX made easy

"...if Latex has a steep learning curve, Lyx is the cable car that whisks you two thirds of the way up the mountain so you can enjoy the views without having to break a sweat. And just as web editors can create websites without you needing to know HTML, Lyx is able to prepare documents for typesetting without getting too involved in all the intricacies of Latex.

"Lyx is a GUI editor originally created in the 1990s by Matthias Ettrich that uses Latex macros to pass parameters to the Tex typesetting engine (which was originally created in the 1970s by Donald Knuth after he became upset by the poor quality phototypesetting of one of his books). It's a document processor, not a word processor, producing high-quality documents with Tex looking after font sizes, margins and graphics.

"But Lyx isn't WYSIWIG; instead it offers a preview option. The Input screen can show comments, cross-references and so on, but it does more. For example, if you want a rotate a table or figure in the output, you can continue to work on it on the Input screen in normal orientation."

Complete Story

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