LyX and LaTeX Woes
Rachel announced that she’d like to use LaTeX for her thesis, which (in my humble opinion) is a very good idea. So, given that the whole “typing commands” interface is a bit overwhelming, I thought that LyX would be a much better option.
I’ve been using LaTeX for years for all kinds of stuff and I find its much better than Word for doing stuff like equations, formatting, bringing together several documents (possibly by several authors) into a cohesive whole. LyX attempts to give a more Word-like interface to LaTeX and, in my experience, is a very nice bit of software. But I’ve only ever used it on Linux, where “apt-get install lyx” is all that is necessary to get it working.
Its significantly harder to get it working on Windows and Mac OS X.
Possibly, a lot of this is not due to LyX itself, but to do with the necessary prerequisites: a working TeX installation. The Mac OS X installation, gwTeX, was a breeze to install as it is based on the i-Installer.app stuff. LyX installed nicely on top of that, but the PDF support was a little lacking. To get nice fonts in Acrobat you have to install the CM-Super package as well and re-run updmap. That took me a while to figure out! Even then, you can’t use pdflatex, as any graphics in the document are defined as EPS by LyX… You can use dvipdfm, but then you don’t get the nice hyperlinking and document structure.
On Windows it seems that the installation is even harder, possibly as Windows doesn’t have many useful packages installed by default, e.g: Python, a shell, etc… So the installation of LyX bombs at the last stage. Mind you, MikTeX seems to be quite easy…
Now, I could probably figure this out, fix the installs, get it working. But wasn’t the point of LyX supposed to be that it is easier to use than plain LaTeX?
October 25th, 2005