!LyX Homepage: http://www.lyx.org

We used !LyX using DocBook on a large paper as a test for using it with Juggler docs. This is a list of issues that we found that need to be resolved before we can use it on a larger scale.

  • Major functional issues
    • Weak DocBook bibliography support
    • !LyX 1.2 or newer is needed for better DocBook support and for image loading support. DocBook support in version 1.3 has not been tested.
    • DocBook cannot be imported into !LyX, but a converter exists (DB2LyX)
    • Inserting raw DocBook code is cumbersome but necessary depending on !LyX' support for various DocBook constructs (bibliographies, for example)
    • !LyX 1.1.x only allows PostScript images to be used. This presents a problem for generating HTML unless JPEG/GIF versions of the (E)PS images exist
  • Minor functional issues
    • GUI refresh (XForms bug apparently)
      • This one is mostly because XForms sucks. !LyX 1.3 and newer have support Qt.
    • JADE vs !OpenJADE—there seem to be differences in style sheets that cause output to vary from installation to installation
    • Footnotes do not always behave well
    • Other XForms-related problems
  • Learning issues
    • How to select different stylesheets
    • How to create custom stylesheets
  • In a perfect world we would like…
    • … to store documents in "native" DocBook (SGML/XML) format
    • … to use custom (or at least nice, professional) style sheets for HTML, !LaTeX, and plain text. (Good PDF and PostScript can be generated from !LaTeX.)