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\begin_layout Title
LyX - the document processor
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Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér
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Something a bit different today - dipping into the technology pool.
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So, why would your favorite scholarly scribe write about Lyx, the document
 processor? Well, to quote Obi-Wan, it is an elegant weapon for a more civilised
 age.
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A lot of people who have published articles in academic journals will know
 the LaTeX markup language.
 This is particularly used in the natural sciences as LaTeX is extremely
 powerful for creating formulae and reaction diagrams.
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WYSIWYG vs LaTeX
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Lyx is an attempt to bridge the gap between WYSIWYG - 
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What You See Is What You Get
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Applications like OpenOffice, Abiword, Microsoft Word and the like.
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 - and LaTeX, which, while creating some very elegant print-quality documents,
 is not particularly easy to get into.
 I have worked with LaTeX from time to time, and it takes quite a while
 to wrap your head around.
 LyX is not a text editor - in the sense that it is not just intended for
 entering text like you would do in an application like 
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 or the infamous Windows Notepad; the focus of LyX is to create documents
 ready for printing.
 Like LaTeX, it makes use of typographical conventions of using no more
 than a certain number of characters on a line to enhance readability, inserting
 spacing of a certain size in the text and so on.
 This makes for beautiful and very readable documents.
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Multi-platform application
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The screenshots here are using LyX on my Slackware Linux laptop, but LyX
 is also available for Microsoft Windows, MacOS X and even OS/2.
 You can get it from the 
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.
 LyX is 
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 published under the GNU General Public License 2.
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As a final note before I move into the main review, I should say that I
 am a linguist and writer, not a mathematician.
 This means that I will be focusing on what one will be using for document
 preparation, not the mathemagical features.
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For
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mathematicians
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For those interested in this, there is a 
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 on the LyX walkthrough.
 It seems to mostly use LaTeX syntax for that.
 LyX is quite well-documented for professional linguists, however – there
 is a dedicated 
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.
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As you see, the main screen is not much different from a lot of text processors.
 The interface can be accessed by using a mouse, but one will notice that
 holding the pointer over a button will show both the function and the keyboard
 shortcut; so the people behind the application encourage keeping your hands
 on the keyboard, which makes for less interruption in your work and less
 strain, which is a constantly increasing problem.
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Setting up the environment
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LyX follows the main principle of LaTeX, which means that the first things
 one does is define which kind of document it is – article, book, letter
 – and there are certain designs included as pre-defined article types to
 match the requirements of various journals or institutions.
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After having defined the environment, you simply continue to define your
 text as you write it – as title matter, author, chapters.
 The system defines the layout as you go along, and it takes full advantage
 of LaTeX functions like footnotes and cross-references, margin notes for
 making overview of the text easier – and of course the various lists, such
 as table of contents, list of figures, list of tables etc.
 All things which can be har getting into with LaTeX, but is integrated
 in the LyX interface.
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It is possible to insert a bibliography from a BibTeX file.
 This is the bibliography format associated with LaTeX, but LyX gives you
 additional options for manipulating the data.
 The BibTeX article in Wikipedia has 
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.
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Actually, the area of bibliography is one of the places where LyX really
 shines; it is one of the places you can see that the system is intended
 for the academic community.
 The whole intention of these systems is to use some fairly simple files,
 mark them up to indicate what is to go where and then leave the system
 to output the materials in the format you want.
 Lyx will import your bibliography file for reference.
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Bibliographies & inserting citations
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Using the citation manager, a citation for the relevant source will be inserted
 as an endnote.
 In this way, your bibliographical notes will be kept up to date as you
 move them around, add or remove.
 It is quite likely you will not want to use all the books you have been
 reading underway in your work, and this way the list will be kept correct
 – and formatted as your article or book style dictates it should be.
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What you see here is the basic text editing window.
 As you see, the text indicates the features inserted there.
 Personally, this reminds me of the 
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.
 Again, more practical than LaTeX because it still keeps the text readable.
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There are some very basic – and I believe this to be intentional – graphical
 effects.
 It is possible to insert images (extremely less complicated than with LaTeX),
 lines and boxes.
 The program is focused on text and text-derived graphics, which means that
 the functions for making tables and diagrams are well-equipped.
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As I mentioned earlier, LyX has quite a bit of documentation, but this is
 not limited to the website.
 As an interesting approach, a lot of documentation is included as LyX files,
 which means that you can read the documentation as well see it in a final
 formatted version after processing it.
 Since LyX creates files for print, it focuses on export to print-oriented
 format.
 There are buttons on the toolbars for creating and updating 
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, PDF and PostScript files.
 And so, the documentation documents also serve as example files.
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Documentation
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If you are working on a thesis or a longer project, try out LyX.
 The application is quite powerful compared to the system resources it requires,
 and it scales remarkable well for very heavy documents, also working quite
 well with pulling in external documents.
 I have edited a very heavy lab manual for a biomedical conference with
 a lot of graphs and hi-res images on a fairly low-specification machine.
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