Saturday, March 21, 2009

Lyx

I love Latex, but sometimes it is a giant pain in the butt to configure. Most of the time it is too tedious to use or takes too long to configure for the amount of time I have to write an essay... but it's SO good looking. Lyx solves that problem.

Lyx is the first WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean) editor built on top of Latex (don't know what Latex is? You poor soul... go to Wikipedia and find out), meaning that whatever you type in will be processed through Latex. My interpretation of it is that it's a souped up Microsoft Word that uses Latex.

The first time you open up Lyx and use it, you'll probably think it's absolutely disgusting. Everything is just ugly, just look at the screenshot. Why in the world would I blog about this when it's so disgusting?



Because look at the output.... (the image is cropped)


Ahhh, so nice of them to use Latex.

It does take a while to get use to (meaning there's a learning curve), for example, to italize a word, you can't just use Ctrl-I (unless you configure the shortcuts). But there are excellent documentations built right into the software with examples and tutorials you can try.

Perfect software to use to impress your science/math (did I tell you that since Lyx uses Latex, its math typesetting is almost perfect?) teacher with your next typed report.

-runiteking1

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