Some applause for the lyx software

 

It is some sort of mystery why the LaTeX ecosystem has so many followers. The only time in which LaTeX was new an shiny was in the 1980s but then many other powerful software were created but it seems that the TeX community doesn't recognizes the change.

Suppose the idea is that LaTeX and especially the Lyx frontend has become old and outdated and the user likes to use a better alternative. Which sort of software comes close to the TeX experience? There are three possible replacement available:

1. text based formatting like lout and markdown
2. WYSIWYG like Libreoffice writer
3. newspaper layout programs like indesign and scribus

Let us start with the first category which has to do with markdown and HTML. In theory, these programs are working similar to tex. The problem is that it remains hard to convert a markdown file into the pdf format. The well known pandoc renderer isn't able to do so natively but he is using LaTeX as a backend. And rendering a HTML file into pdf will result into lower quality.

What most non TeX users are prefering to write longer documents is perhaps libreoffice writer. The current version is 7.0. But libreoffice has some problems. First one is, that after inserting more than 3 images the GUI will become very slow. The recommneded workaround is to deactivate the display of the images. Indeed this will provide the maximum performance, but then the user can't see what the figure is about.

A second problem in libreoffice is, that the images can't be scaled simple to 50%. After resizing the frame with a mouse the new size will affect the ratio and the dialog box has no ability to maintain a certain ratio. Also libreoffice doesn't supports floating images and the ability to create fully justified text is low.

On the other hand of the line there are sophisticated layout programs available like scribus. Sometimes Scribus and indesign are recommended to fulfill professional needs. But a closer look at this programs will show, that they are doing the opposite from what a technical authors needs. The main idea is that the user is creating frames on the page, but this is not what a text author likes to do. A book or an academic paper isn't defined by it's visual structure but by hierarchical sections. That means a book is working with 1. section, 1.2 as a subsection and so on. This system isn't supported in Scribus. Even the creation of a table of contents is practical impossible.

We can reduce the comparison to a small question: Can libreoffice writer replace Lyx? The answer is no. Even Libreoffice has reached a high version number 7, it is in the current version not able to process lots of images in a technical document. That means there is a reason why latex, lyx or texniccenter is available. All the programs have a measurable advantage over libreoffice. The main idea behind TeX is very easy to explain: There is somewhere a plain text file which is less than 500 kb. This text file is edited in the software of choice and after running the LaTeX software the pdf file is rendered which can contain endless amount of figures, tables and high resolution pictures. The user won't get any problems in creating such large documents nor he gets a slowdown from the software while entering the text.