(no subject)

[prog]

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.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

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.