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-   -   latex/lyx (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/latex-lyx-581502/)

autophil 09-01-2007 01:20 PM

latex/lyx
 
Im trying to get to grips with latex & lyx. If there is someone who can show me the logic of this filetype or point me to the light.
I first came accross latex/tex when I installed MuLinux on a really old machine and I thought ok thats cool. A neat little word processor that fits into a tiny space and can spit out a good looking document when interpreted correctly.
The fact that it is basically for documents, stored in a text format makes it sound kind of rustic. But hey, that could appeal to me. Simple and flexible. But the first surprise was that to download and install it on my Slackware machine takes up more space than a regular word processor. More disk space than a complete linux distro!!
Then again if I wanted to store a manuscript or a paper with a specific layout, I could do it in a text format using html. So how would my life be improved by using latex/lyx/tex?
It also uses a unique kind of text format, and not just a simple .txt or other.
...........phil

Okie 09-01-2007 01:48 PM

if you want something modern with the same philosophy try GNU/TeXMacs http://www.texmacs.org/

Okie 09-01-2007 01:50 PM

P.S. dont let the screenshots fool ya, this is not just for math formulas, it handles text documents quite well too...

autophil 09-02-2007 05:13 AM

OK so I installed that on my zenwalk laptop and I get the message that I need "guile" = 3.7Mb
It also needs tetex-3.0 = 47Mb
This brings me back to my original question. All of this takes up the diskspace of a whole small distro. So why dont I just install a good word processor. Or if I want to go simple and flexible, just do my work with text and html tags. When this simple text format is viewed through a browser it results in a polished document complete with tables and graphics. So my question is what is so great about texmacs/latex/lyx etc.
Its not a criticism, Im just trying to find out. There must be something special about them that Im missing.
phil.............

AdaHacker 09-02-2007 09:32 AM

You're comparing apples and oranges. LaTeX was designed to do high-quality typesetting for scientific papers. It is not a light-weight substitute for a word processor. It was intended to generate large, complex documents with lots of mathematical formulas, citations, tables, and figures. The idea is that it allows the user to focus on the content of the document and not have to mess around with the appearance too much. In other words, you tell LaTeX what the document should contain and LaTeX takes care of making it look good.

If you're asking yourself why LaTeX is better than a word processor or just writing HTML, then you obviously don't need LaTeX. If you're not writing any large or highly technical documents, then there really isn't much advantage to using it.


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