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Praise

Praise about LyX

Do you like using LyX? Would you like to give the developers a pat on their shoulders but they're too far away?

1.  Praise

Add your entries directly below this line (entries are in reverse chronological order).

1.1  2020-08-13 Bogdan <b(at)0x7(dot)top>

Although Latex output looks clean and professional, let's face it: Latex is messy. I tried to find a workaround using Texmacs until it crashed a few times. I ended up writing my PhD thesis in LyX thanks to a fellow student who previously succeeded with it. And I was very happy about this. Although LyX GUI looks not very appealing at first, the software is quite predictable and fast. The only thing I could wish in the future, better collaboration tools (see Overleaf for example). I believe that LyX has not replaced Latex due to several reasons combined: (1) Steeper learning curve compared to Word-like processors. On the other hand, if you are already experienced with Latex, then you learn LyX very fast. The feature of directly editing the preamble is extremely useful. (2) Sort of ugly GUI. Yes, the form is important. In Texmacs you get at least some approximation of what is a page, for example. Having to read a very long row of text when LyX is full screen is very, very repulsive. Yes, text wrapping by default would not hurt. (3) No out-of-box collaboration tools. Moreover, before using LyX one has to separately install Latex. It would be easier if some minimal version of Latex was packaged with LyX. At least as a default option, i.e. in a one-click installer. See Anaconda for inspiration.

To conclude, I highly recommend LyX to anyone. Despite its seemingly unattractive interface it is a great piece of software. Here, I provide some hints for the community. Helping beginners, we help ourselves.

1.2  2018-09-15 Pooya Jannaty

I almost entirely use LyX to typeset my notes, which contain a massive amount of equations. The fact that you can see complex equations as you type and never have to worry about finding an unmatched parenthetical is refreshing. My two other favorite features in LyX are defining/modifying commands and customizing keyboard shortcuts for them as well as the LyX macros. Being a software developer myself, I really appreciate the effort the developers have put in to make such a fantastic product. Well done!

1.3  2016-03-10 Ken Gilbert

Dear Lyx folks, a while back, I complained loudly about a "bug" that turned out not to be a bug, but just my own ignorance, which you politely corrected. Now I am happily writing a physics textbook using LyX. I absolutely could not do it without LyX. I made a donation in 2016 and will do so every year from here on out. LyX is a fabulous piece of software. I cannot thank you enough. I recommended LyX to my editor at Springer but found out they are committed to a commercial system called "Overleaf." I took a look at Overleaf, and for my purposes, it cannot compete with LyX. It did make me think about "Cloud" collaborative projects as something in the future of Lyx. However, for now, I am as happy as a pig in mud (as we rednecks in Mississippi like to say). Best Regards, Ken Gilbert

1.4  2016-02-01 Kyle

I've been using LyX since my master's adviser introduced me to it in 2007. It was used for my MS thesis and PhD dissertation, as well as most of my journal articles, all my conference publications and now my handouts and exams for classes that I teach. It would be difficult to overstate the impact that it has had on my professional document creation. The developers have, and continue to produce an amazing piece of software that is very useful to me.

1.5  2015-03-23 Jos

Writing a thesis, just discovered the navigation panel and its functionalities: I love LyX!

1.6  2014-08-26 Al

I'm using LyX to write my dissertation (about halfway through at the moment) and I'm amazed at how smooth and intuitive everything is, especially compared to raw LaTeX and Word. It's quite pleasing to find open-source software that is as polished as LyX seems to be. LyX really needs more publicity, it's a shame I didn't discover it earlier.

1.7  2014-06-04 John Wallace

I understand that LyX is commonly used for academic and mathematical texts -- however, I would like to emphasize that LyX is also an incredibly useful tool for novelists. In addition to the consistent formatting when required, it handles massive documents with great ease. I have found nothing else like it.

1.8  2014-02-03 Anne Mulhern

http://opensource.com/business/14/2/observations-red-hat-software-engineer ---

1.9  2012-08-12 Rob

I used LyX a long time ago, and have been using it for the last 18 months or so in preparing written teaching materials. Everyone else in the organisation was using M$ Word and M$ Publisher. They could not understand how I could produce such consistent publications! I am now using it for study in conjunction with JabRef and have recently figured out how to get Australian English spellcheck and thesaurus working. I would like to thank the LyX team for their wonderful product.

1.10  2012-03-12 Justin

I remember LyX from the alpha versions over a decade ago. I forgot about LaTeX and LyX during my stint in industry, because everyone in the corporate world uses Word. Having come back to academia for a PhD, I purchased Word and a leading equation editor M*thType, because that's what my fellow students were using. I couldn't get inline equations to look right--the spacing was awkward, the baselines didn't line up. Then Word trashed all the inline formulas and converted them to uneditable images, costing me at least a few hours. Microsoft had no idea what I was talking about, and the M*thType folks were useless. Just three days before the deadline I understood my mistake and rediscovered LyX. Although citations with the achicago style didn't work, I was able to add LaTeX code myself and get the paper out on-time. The best part is that the slick type layout strategies in LaTeX are fully handled by the underlying system, and math is handled gracefully for a clean, professional look, yet I can focus on the text of my paper and not visually sift through all the code as I write. I look forward to using this tool for years to come.

1.11  2011-07-04 Peter

In terms of graphical editing capability LyX is certainly the bee's knees. TexMacs filled the gap (I hate writing LaTeX code raw as it is the most pointless exercise EVER!) but wasn't the best compiler. Very clunky and difficult to use. LyX is a beautiful thing. I'm currently writing another book on it and it is so much simpler to use in terms of arrangement and capability. LyX > WinTeXMacs

1.12  2011-07-04 Walter

Thank you for making TeX approachable. My migration from LyX 1.x on Linux to LyX 2.x on Mac even worked without serious issue. Thanks a lot for providing good cross-platform free software that solves real world problems.

1.13  2010-06-03 Noran Azmy

LyX is my single favorite piece of software. I am really grateful to everyone behind this work, you made my life so much easier. Great documentation, great community, thank you.

1.14  2010-05-05 Kevin Brubeck Unhammer

LyX makes it possible to recommend LaTeX to non-geeks. Amazing stuff.

1.15  2009-06-11 W. Bentley MacLeod

Lyx is a fantastic WP - I get all my coauthors (including reluctant word users) and students on to LyX. (also you have implemented several features that I previously asked Scientific word to add, who told me that it was more or less impossible. At this point lyx is far superior to SW - more compatible with latex and lots of useful features.)

1.16  2009-04-17 Hinrich Göhlmann

Initially I thought I was naive to try this. But I have been positively surprised. I always liked the concept of LaTeX, but never really liked the idea of mixing commands with text (I am NOT a LaTeX expert!). To me it always distracts and hinders the readability. If I write a text, I would like to focus on the text. Until I met LyX a few years ago... So, this time around I decided to even try LyX for writing a camera-ready book. I convinced my colleague to become a co-author and we both only used LyX and other open-source software (The Gimp, Inkscape, JabRef, ImageMagick, R, Eclipse, StatET) - well, almost - for the preflight to check for non-CMYK objects I used Acrobat Professional. And the result is now to be published by Chapman & Hall in June (google for ISBN 1420065157 if you are interested). Problems: at times some ERT to fix things that are defined by the LaTeX style of Chapman & Hall. Furhtermore, a number of weird things that we had to ignore (e.g., parts of sentences suddenly disappearing from a number of chapter-files - we still do not know how that could have happened). Also the conversion from 1.5 to 1.6 did not work, so I had to reinstall 1.5 after my computer had received an OS upgrade. But all in all it was a very positive experience. And if there will ever be the need to come up with a revised edition, this will be a piece of cake as the whole setup is now in place! Thanks folks for making such a nice program!

1.17  2008-12-31 Matt

It's amazing just how good Lyx has become. Scientific Workstation has got nothing on Lyx and the latter will cost you a decent amount of money. I think the entry into excellence for the windows version occurred in v1.6, when it became possible to directly past .emf graphics from the clipboard into lyx. No more fussing with converting to .eps by hand. The equation interface is a perfect blend between the keyboard and various math palettes. I can produce math documents in lyx, nearly as quickly as I can by hand, and it looks a heck of a lot better too, and is a lot easier to share with others. Now I just await some way to use the documentation as a scripting engine, say along the lines of sage. Actually there is sagetex, maybe better integration with sagetex and a port to windows would do the trick :).

1.18  2008-12-26 Steve

I abandoned Scientific WorkPlace several years ago (it's far too expensive) to switch to Wolfram's Publicon, and now I have given up waiting for Wolfram to get around to updating Publicon and linking it sensibly to Mathematica, so I have finally got around to trying out Lyx (version 1.6.1) for the first time. The Lyx team really understands (La)TeX, so the Lyx software is excellent. I have checked that I can transfer (a sample of) my documents from Publicon to Lyx (via LaTeX), and there is no problem even with very complicated technical documents. The quality of Lyx seems to be not far short of Scientific WorkPlace, yet it is free software. Well done!

1.19  2008-09-19 Samar

I just downloaded the 1.6rc2. This is phenomenal work. I have been using Lyx for about ten years and use it for everything. I used Latex for a fair amount of time before that. Lyx 1.6rc2 surpasses anything I know or have tried or come across. This is a phenomenal team of people who are doing an outstanding job. Thank you all very very much.

1.20  August 2008 Matthieu

I just discovered Lyx three days ago... and rediscovered lateX!! I have only one regret... that I didn't discovered Lyx earlier! I spent so much time on writing in pure Latex editors and compiling and now everything seems so easy! Thank you very much!!

1.21  March 2008 - Dawid Ciecierski

I've been using LyX for a few months and it wins with Word hands down. I don't even write letters in Word anymore! Just wanted to say a quick and BIG thank you to all of you who make it possible and support others in their editorial life.

1.22  2008-02-22 - Matthias Groh

Dear Mr Ettrich,

I just wanted to thank you and the LyX Team (can't write to everybody so I selected you randomly...) for this wonderful piece of free software. I started using it in my first academic year and use it mainly for texts with many mathematic and physical formulas. I can't image how my fellow students can still use these messy office suites... To cut a long story short: Keep it up, I appreciate your work.

Best regards, Matthias Groh, Marburg

1.23  2007-09-16 - John Gardner

I just completed an entire research paper using LyX. The BibTeX and natbib integration worked perfectly -- I've never completed a references section so easily. LyX easily handled all of the mathematics, as well as the section numbering, table and figure numbering and cross-referencing. But the best part was the tables. To my knowledge, there is NO easier way to create high-quality LaTeX tables in a graphical environment than with LyX. At this point, the only disadvantage that LyX has over competing software like Scientific Word is the occasional crash.

1.24  2007-07-27 - Jan & Ivana

Couple of months ago we would laugh at everybody who would say we ever start making TeX documents - as genuine windows users, the notepad/commandline/compiling stuff was really out of our world and with the availability of InDesign the Great in my job, there seemed to be no reason to do this - until we were both faced with the task to make a diploma thesis, a task that makes all the otherwise so usefull DTP tools futile. Then we found Lyx. Well, it is buggy, it crashes once in a while on windows, does not always do what you would expect it do to, but still it is so powerful and saves an unbelievable amount of time.

Once we were really frigthened when we found that some journals demand the paper submissions in LaTex - would we get the funding for a secretary to do this horrible job for me? Now Lyx is out secretary - it does all the work, allowing us to stay far away from backslashes (although we have to admit that we have already used some ERT, mostly to create special characters, we still do not know even how to make a Hello-world document in LaTeX). We are now actively spreading the word - and it is amusing to see people suprprised by the ease of publishing that Lyx brings.

1.25  2007-07-20 - Timmie

I just want to give a big THANKS to the Lyx programmers. You are creating a very useful and well thought programme which helped me to write my thesis without the need to think worry about typesetting. The supervison especially bentioned how he was impressed by the layout and liked the bibliography which fromatted via bibtex. Of course, I had some problems here and there but I was able to solved them with the help of the Lyx users mailing list and the thoroughly created documentation.

=> I encourage every serious scientist do consider writing with Lyx/JabRef

=> I wish the developer team all strength to carry on

1.26  2007-05-17 - Steve Litt

From his post on the user's list:

1.27  March 2007 - anonymous

If you're looking for a programme that's capable of managing really, really large files containing plenty of [foot/end] notes, large bibliographies, figures, cross references - articles, books, theses, the works - without crashing on you, go for LyX! It takes a bit of getting used to it, but it's absolutely worth it. Go for the latest version (1.5.0 beta). ff; 4 March 2007

1.28  Matthew, (MA, USA)

Lyx is awesome! Anyone who has to do technical writing becomes acquainted with hopelessness and despair using Word. Citations are an abomination, as are numbering equations; random crashes, corruption of files that contain a lot of graphics etc. are all the norm with that MS bloatware. Lyx is a nice mix of the professional layout and typesetting provided by Latex, with a nice visual interface that provides immediate feedback to the user. I use Lyx on windows ; and even though it is not as well supported there and crashes occasionally it is still the very best word processor I know of on that platform, unless you want to spend $1000 or so and purchase Scientific Workplace (which is also based on Latex). As a word processor, the Scientific Workplace product has nothing on Lyx. In math mode I prefer Lyx since it immediately interprets raw Latex, whereas scientific workplace has it's own keyboard shortcuts that one has to learn. The other freeware competitor to lyx would be texmacs, but it doesn't work very well on windows, being rather dependent on cygwin. Matthew, (MA, USA)

1.29  2006-05-02 - Hans Bezemer, (Delft, Netherlands)

When moving to Linux in February 2000, I started to use Wordperfect, which was logical because it was the thing I had been using since the late eighties. However, it was bugridden and I started looking for something else. StarOffice was not quite what I had in mind, so I turned to LyX. This was what I had been looking for all my life! It took care of everything and all I had to do was write. I painstakingly reformatted 350+ pages in LyX, but it was absolutely worth it. I do all my major writing in LyX now. With Word I have an output of about 10 pages a day (when using images, TOC, etc), with LyX 20, 30 pages, easily! I will only revert to OpenOffice for the simplest of letters or the 1000+ pages in Word I haven't ported yet. Even if I hit an error in LyX which causes it to segfault (very, very rarely!) it will save my document until the last character before dying.
It is without a doubt the very best wordprocessor I've ever used for the simple reason that it allows a writer to write and does not force him to be a layout artist.
Hans Bezemer, May 2nd, 2006 (Delft, Netherlands)

1.30  2005-12-12 - Richard Kleeman, (New York)

I have been using lyx for five years now to write around 30 papers. Absolutely indispensable application for linux. 1.3.6 with instant preview and qt looks fantastic on my LCD display. With bibliography support it makes writing papers so much easier. -- Richard Kleeman, 2005-12-12 (New York)

1.31  2005-12-12 - Gabriel, (Vienna, Austria)

LyX was esential for getting my thesis (finance/economics) done. I really spent more time on writing rather than formating text. Thanks to everybody who contributed to this great piece of free/open software! -- Gabriel, 2005-12-12 (Vienna, Austria)

1.32  2004-05-07 - Richard

Awesome software. I've used it since Sept 2002 to typeset reports and papers of all kinds; the biggest so far is 350 pages and over 70MB Postscript output. LyX has been an absolute champion for me on several flavours of Linux, and I'm now using it on my iBook in OS X. I have no fear about writing my entire PhD thesis in LyX, and I recommend it wherever I can.

IMO, there is no better document preparation solution on any platform. -- Richard, 2004-05-07

1.33  Anonymous

Wrote all my project reports in college with LyX. I was polishing the content while my MS Word-oriented friends were screwing around to make sure the chapters were numbered correctly. And the output is so unbeliveably great! Truly, an amazing piece of work, I hope more people learn of it and use it. Thank you so much, developers!

1.34  2003-07-23 - Paul

Great writing tool, just keeps getting better. Does for Latex what IDEs did for programming. -- Paul 2003-07-23

1.35  2003-03-27 - Johnathan

Way to go developers! LyX 1.3.1 QT on GNU/Linux Slackware 9.0, and LCD display with subpixel hinting, TTFonts. Looks AWESOME, and is a pleasure to use. Writing my first first-author paper with it, and PhD thesis as well. Keep up the great work. -Johnathan 030327

1.36  2003-03-04 - 'Christian''

I've been using LyX since 1997 (version 0.10!!)... and I've not regretted using it once! Thanks for a great software! Right now I'm finishing my 250+ pages thesis with it. -- 2003-03-04 Christian

Praise

2.  Praise or spam

2.1  2009-06-29 - Jean Dahlquist

Subject: I LOVE YOU
Body: Really. I do.