Lyx on the mac
I'm probably one of the last ones getting there, but I decided to do my best not to use Microsoft Word for editing my phd thesis. Oh yes - since I managed to arrive till this painful state, shall I give myself ever more troubles by using word? Not at all...
So I found out that there's a nice app which benefits from LaTex, but has an easy front-end. It's Lyx. I followed the very good tutorial which can be found here, and I report in this article my experience... it takes a little bit.
The tutorial hints at two ways to install latex: one is longer and and involves the usage of i-installer to get the libraries needed, and according to the author the whole thing will sum up to 300 megs more or less. The other one instead involves an already-packaged version of latex - MacTex -Â which will take up more than one gig of space, says the installer.
So I went for the first one. Unfortunately i-installer couldn't find one package, Ghostship. I had to give up, if I wanted to abandon word before dust...
Not so easily though. I went for the second option, installing MacTex. Takes almost 5 minutes, and it slowed down my navigation with firefox considerably, but everything was smooth.
So I went on as the tutorial suggests and downloaded and installed Lyx. Another problem here, unfortunately..cause the MacTex installation does not have the same location Lyx is expecting. Basically, it looks for a /teTex subdirectory, while all the stuff we installed with MacTex is locate in .
What to do? No worries, just run Lyx (which you should have copied to your app folder) and it runs anyway!!
The next important step to get going is having the dictionaries available. Another good tutorial can be found here, even if I found it much easier to just download Cocoaspell, a macos interface to Aspell. And there you go, follow the instructions to set up the newly imported dictionaries, install some more of them, and it's done!
Word, your days are coming to an end!