LyX (and LaTeX):the other way to write your texts

Talking about word processors is often limited to never ending discussions about Microsoft Word and Open Office writer. It happens then you learn that many people who has very intensive writing needs uses very different tools and you end by discovering, or I might say re-discovering, a completely different way to write. The tools I'm talking of are the markup typesetting languages like LaTeX and DocBook. In order to use this kind of programs you have to write your text almost like a computer program, using a set of commands to define chapters, character styles and so on. Here is how the beginning of this text may look like in LaTeX:

...

\begin{document}

\title{\LyX{} (and \LaTeX{}):the other way to write your texts}

\author{Massimo Musante}

\maketitle

\section*{Introduction }

Talking about word processors is often limited to never-ending

discussions about Microsoft Word and Open Office writer. It happens

then you learn that many people who has very intensive writing needs

uses very different tools and you end by discovering, or I might say

re-discovering, a completely different way to write. The tools I'm

talking of are the typesetting languages like \LaTeX{} and DocBook.

In order to use this

...

I had my first experiences with a similar program, Troff, when I was studying (there are few ways to write a document from a green-phosphors VT100 terminal). Learning curve had been quite steep and when new computers with more modern word processors where made available I quickly dismissed these languages as relics from past. After many years I learn that old typesetting languages have evolved, some new has been developed and many people continue using them. I so decided to have a look to the LaTeX universe to understand if it's still a viable way to write your texts and if the learning curve has been some-way made easier. After a brief research on the Internet I discovered LyX, a writing software that promised to make writing a document with LaTeX as easy as using any other word processing application. I so installed LyX, easily from Ubuntu's software center, and started trying it by writing this post with it.

WYSIWYG vs WYSIWYM

Word processing software we are used to know, like Open Office Writer, are usually referred as WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) since they show you in the screen how your document will appear once printed. by contrast other writing software like LyX has been called WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean) since what they show you on screen is e representation of document's logical structure (sections, chapters ...) of representing its physical layout. The WYSIWYM concept works great when the content of your text is preponderant above its layout. For example if you're writing a book or an article you're going to use an handful of text styles over all the document but it will be fundamental using them in a consistent way. On the other hand if your are writing documents where layout is preponderant, like leaflets, the better feedback with the document final layout will probably make you save time. The major drawback of using WYSIWYM concept has ever been the steep learning curve of typesetting markup languages ... at least until now.