prog | (no subject)

Anyone had any experience with LyX? About to write a long and involved technical document for the first time in a while (in a year and a half, really). The thought of once again hand-grinding DocBook tags with Emacs fills me with ennui.

I suppose I could use this here copy of Word, too. But it offends my nostrils for divers reasons, and not (just) the hairy-hooting "free as in speech" ones. Fact is, I very much prefer the DocBooky way of working with a document structurally, rather than layout-wise. There are ways to kinda-sorta do this in Word, and as far as I know they are all shallow and weak hacks.

I'm passing the time now waiting for tetex to install, praying it compiles. Dum de dum.

Update: Pff. Never mind. It compiled, and the application runs, but trying to convert the intro page into HTML results in a baroque error, and trying to covert it into a PDF results in a pageful of garbage. Flussssh

I hate everything.

Update 2: Oh, I didn't have the latex2html program installed. Trying to fink it now. Also I didn't notice that there's a bunch of PDF converters to choose from, and some seem to actually work OK.

I'll start kicking through the tutorial while that program tries to install itself... if I can't easily turn what I write into HTML, it's a deal-breaker.

Update 3: The HTML conversion magically works, post-finking. OK, less hateful now.

Update 4: The HTML conversion command seems to have vanished from my menus in between launches of the application. Um.

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So, LyX is basically a graphical frontend for LaTeX? I'd be worried that it wouldn't give me as much control as LaTeX, which would probably be fine for an article, but I'd worry about using it to do a book. (Although ifyour ultimate goal is to turn it into HTML, then a lot of the formatting stuff doesn't really matter.) Still, it's intriguing. I might have to play around with it this weekend. I'd be interested to hear about your experiences with it.

I dunno how much LaTeX experience you have, but I've gathered quite a bit of experience in the last 3.5 months, and I'd be happy to consult/answer questions/etc.

Never used any member of the TeX family before. It's not clear to me what the relationship between LaTeX and LyX is.

HTML will be my most important target format, but PDF/PS is also important to me. Its PS conversion is very very very slow. It's taking forever to handle a 32-page document (its own tutorial). My printer is looking at it and panicking. Is it full of weird control characters? I don't know.

I would imagine it's full of large image files, which slows things down considerably.

Reference books to recommend are The LaTeX Companion and Guide to LaTeX. Most things I want to know are in one or the other of those books (and I refer to them quite a bit during some work days). I think the TeX Users Group has some good resources, too.

Once you've got something into HTML, the easiest way to convert to PDF is often to print it via your favourite browser to a PS or PDF print driver. There is at least a chance of getting the pagination right, which in my experience never happens otherwise. I've used the PDF995 print driver for this to good effect despite it being annoying adware.