LyX is a what you see is what you mean word processor that acts as a LaTeX frontend. Essentially, you first select your LaTeX environment from a menu (standard, section, subsection, enumerate, quote, etc.), then type. You see an approximation of what your printed or PDF’d document will look like on-screen, but it’s ultimately processed with your LaTeX engine. It also has nice feature whereby equations are input using the normal LaTeX syntax, but rendered in real time.
Some other features of LyX include:
- Menu-based tweaking of document settings, such as bullet style, margin size, columns, etc. These options, which aren’t changed a lot, are the hardest parts of the LaTeX language to remember.
- Built in classes. LyX knows the environments available for popular document classes, such as FoilTeX. So as long as you have FoilTeX installed, you can use it without having to learn its syntax and options in addition to the normal LaTeX language.
- Export to PDF, LaTeX, HTML, DVI and PS, depending on the options installed on your system.
- Ability to insert raw LaTeX code — for example, if you have a table created using R’s xtable package, you can just insert the entire thing as raw code.
LyX is completely open source. It’s been around for a while, but it was fairly buggy. With the latest release, it seems 100% usable and stable.
In order to use LyX, you need, at minimum, a LaTeX installation (Mac, Win), and for full functionality, there are some other requirements, like Ghostscript and other utilities that I believe are included in MacTeX and ProTeXt. LyX is available for Windows and Mac. It’s fairly easy to use right off the bat, but I suggest PDFing the User’s Guide and giving it a read to get the most out of LyX.
Update: I added a list of some common keyboard shortcuts for LyX on OS X in the Reference cards section.
