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Re: [school-discuss] software to demo = LyX



Michael Shigorin wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 01:49:13AM +0800, Colin Charles wrote:

I'm curious to know, where is OpenOffice.org, and its
bibliography tooll, rough around the edges when compared with
LyX (and well, latex)?

It doesn't use LaTeX as an final output formatting engine and has
to be msword-compatible.

Yes it mimicks typography somewhat, but the gross result is that
obtaining (almost) professionally-looking result from LyX
material is way easier.

Though the learning/looking curves differ very significantly both
in slope and shape, as well as different things being "virtually
impossible".

In short, at least having a week's look at LyX is worth for any
student even if being word-alike user in the Real Job (tm).

I use LyX for most of my own writing, and OpenOffice for editing other people's stuff, or for when I need easy interoperability with spreadsheets (you can import spreadsheet data into LyX, but it's a pain).

There is an experimental LaTeX plugin for OpenOffice, and a BibTeX plugin project has started, but there was no code the last time I looked. In my experience, nothing beats BibTeX for citation and bibliography generation. Last semester I produced a book of readings for my course, and converted all the citations from the original sources into Chicago style, with a unified bibliography at the end of the book instead of separate ones at the end of each paper. It wasn't easy, but I don't think I would have attempted it at all using any any tool other than BibTeX.

Robin

--
"Caesar non supra grammaticos." - Suetonius

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Univeritesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin