An overview of LyX

LyX is a very nice graphical editor for LaTeX documents. It is similar to Scientific Word but has a few advantages: it is free, it runs under any environment that supports X-Windows (all versions of unix, including linux, and Windows PCs with appropriate software), and it produces documents that are somewhat more portable than Scientific Word.

LyX is easy to install and use under Linux or other versions of Unix. It has also been ported to Microsoft Windows but it requires a X-Windows server program, which is not a standard part of Windows. For more information, see the LyX web site.

LyX has extensive online help available. It is possible to learn to use it pretty quickly, even if you don't know TeX already. To create a new document, just start it up and start typing. To edit an existing LaTeX document, start LyX and then "import" the document to get it into LyX's internal format (which differs slightly from TeX and uses the extension ".lyx" rather than ".tex").