I’ve been using LyX for preparing my doctoral dissertation and I’m amazed that such a complete and capable tool isn’t more widely known and used. I can’t imagine preparing scientific documents now with anything other than LyX, and I can’t imagine that I used to use software like MS Word for this purpose. Anyone have any other examples of obscure but amazingly capable software?
I guess LyX must have improved a lot in the last few years. When I tried using it for my PhD thesis I had to give up after it refused to import classes and templates mandated by the university, and the documentation on how to deal with this issue was, well… open-sores level. I did use it to create a few snippets, later manually edited. It did not really save me any time.
Re other obscure software, Total Commander is a great Windows file manager, similar to the Linux Midnight Commander.
It seems weird that it would refuse to import templates, I’ve had no trouble with that at all. Even when templates use highly non-standard settings, you can still directly edit the LaTeX preamble in LyX, and done correctly that should take care of 99% of problems.
(I hope this doesn’t sound condescending) but do you mean Latex, or LyX specifically? Latex itself seems almost humorously field-dependent: everywhere in the hard sciences and nowhere in business.
Mind-mapping is something that would seem to be highly relevant to the LW community. Personally, though, I find that the restriction to a tree structure is too limiting. Unless I’ve completely misunderstood how mind-mapping works.
You haven’t, but that’s what makes personalbrain so awesome. It doesn’t limit you to the tree structure,anything can be a parent or child of anything else, and there’s sideways “jump” connections that don’t follow the parent child relation at all.
Not to mention the ability to link to any file or website, take notes on each connection, and name the connections. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of software.
I was introduced to LaTeX via LyX as a freshman and found the interface very off-putting and confusing and forgot about the whole thing for years. When I found out I could just type a text file instead, run a few commands, and get the same gorgeous result, it was a revelation and I never went back to OpenOffice.
Probably not news to anyone here, but learning to use a good text editor like vim or emacs is hugely useful and I wish I hadn’t waited so long to do it. Git for version control is pretty great too.
For me it was the exact opposite. I’d been using LaTeX for years before I discovered LyX. I can’t imagine writing in raw LaTeX anymore. Especially, live math preview has become indispensable for me, as well as ‘smart’ label handling and intelligent handling of documents composed of multiple independent files (like chapters in a book).
I’m only an undergrad physics major, but I’m in 2 classes where I have to submit moderately high level reports, and I’m working on a thesis. And I’ve only ever had to use one special format, which also happened to be the default format.
So far, I’ve found documentation to be eh, but I haven’t had too many problems where that was an issue yet. The biggest problem is that my knowledge of LaTeX is sorely lacking because I’ve been using Lyx for everything!
I’ve been using LyX for preparing my doctoral dissertation and I’m amazed that such a complete and capable tool isn’t more widely known and used. I can’t imagine preparing scientific documents now with anything other than LyX, and I can’t imagine that I used to use software like MS Word for this purpose. Anyone have any other examples of obscure but amazingly capable software?
I guess LyX must have improved a lot in the last few years. When I tried using it for my PhD thesis I had to give up after it refused to import classes and templates mandated by the university, and the documentation on how to deal with this issue was, well… open-sores level. I did use it to create a few snippets, later manually edited. It did not really save me any time.
Re other obscure software, Total Commander is a great Windows file manager, similar to the Linux Midnight Commander.
It seems weird that it would refuse to import templates, I’ve had no trouble with that at all. Even when templates use highly non-standard settings, you can still directly edit the LaTeX preamble in LyX, and done correctly that should take care of 99% of problems.
(I hope this doesn’t sound condescending) but do you mean Latex, or LyX specifically? Latex itself seems almost humorously field-dependent: everywhere in the hard sciences and nowhere in business.
LyX specifically.
http://www.thebrain.com/ is a little known but amazingly useful knowledge modeling/ridiculously powerful mindmapping software.
Mind-mapping is something that would seem to be highly relevant to the LW community. Personally, though, I find that the restriction to a tree structure is too limiting. Unless I’ve completely misunderstood how mind-mapping works.
You haven’t, but that’s what makes personalbrain so awesome. It doesn’t limit you to the tree structure,anything can be a parent or child of anything else, and there’s sideways “jump” connections that don’t follow the parent child relation at all.
Not to mention the ability to link to any file or website, take notes on each connection, and name the connections. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of software.
Seems interesting, I’ll have a look.
I was introduced to LaTeX via LyX as a freshman and found the interface very off-putting and confusing and forgot about the whole thing for years. When I found out I could just type a text file instead, run a few commands, and get the same gorgeous result, it was a revelation and I never went back to OpenOffice.
Probably not news to anyone here, but learning to use a good text editor like vim or emacs is hugely useful and I wish I hadn’t waited so long to do it. Git for version control is pretty great too.
For me it was the exact opposite. I’d been using LaTeX for years before I discovered LyX. I can’t imagine writing in raw LaTeX anymore. Especially, live math preview has become indispensable for me, as well as ‘smart’ label handling and intelligent handling of documents composed of multiple independent files (like chapters in a book).
I am also a massive fan of Lyx.
I’m only an undergrad physics major, but I’m in 2 classes where I have to submit moderately high level reports, and I’m working on a thesis. And I’ve only ever had to use one special format, which also happened to be the default format.
So far, I’ve found documentation to be eh, but I haven’t had too many problems where that was an issue yet. The biggest problem is that my knowledge of LaTeX is sorely lacking because I’ve been using Lyx for everything!
LyX fans: Do you have any comments on the relative merits of LyX and TeXmacs?