Lyx: The Document Processor!

Good! I will try "Lyx", the first wysiwym LaTeX editor!

Below are copied from the official website of Lyx.

The LaTeX Document Processor

Recent LyX news:

• LyX 1.5.2 released. (Oct 8, 2007)
• LyX 1.5.1 released. (Aug 4, 2007)
• LyX 1.5.0 temporarily removed (Jul 31, 2007)
• LyX 1.5.0 released. (Jul 27, 2007)
• LyX 1.4.5.1 released. (Jul 27, 2007)

Check the LyX news page for the full stories.

What is LyX?

LyX is the first WYSIWYM document processor.

Ehhh... please explain.

LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. It is released under a Free Software / Open Source license.

LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, 'finger painting' font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth's legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.

On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output -- or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced -- looks like nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes 'eating' your dissertation the evening before going to press.

LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.

But where did it come from?

LyX is designed for scientists by scientists, and it shows, in world-class support for math and structured document creation. Such staples of scientific authoring as reference list and index creation come standard. But you don't have to be a scientist: with LyX you create just as easily a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well designed document layouts and style modification and feature support packages are built in.

Wow! Tell me more!

Find out More About LyX (features, screenshots, internationalization, etc.) here. Or try the Internet resources page for information on mailing lists, mirrors, and other English and non-English web sites. Use the navigation bar on every page to get around this site, or check out the site map for quick and dirty access to all the pages.

Just to whet your appetite and show you what LyX can do, here are two of the seventy-five or so gifs from the LyX Graphical Tour. The first shows a page of (rather busy) text being edited in LyX, while the second shows the printed output resulting from that page.

I'm convinced. I want LyX now!

The "How to get it" page has information on the various versions of LyX (stable, pre-releases, SVN, and development), in various forms (source, RPM, binaries), mirrors, and required and optional software.

If you just can't wait, here are direct links to the latest stable sources (version 1.5.2). Or you can visit the LyX developers' site, where you can get the very latest bugfixes via anonymous SVN, or download development versions.