When I criticised the cross-referencing feature, I prefixed it with a warning about my previous experience with Microsoft Word. Perhaps LyX does it better (certainly TeX has a great reputation for that kind of thing), but for someone coming from the same background as me — almost everyone judging by Microsoft’s sales figures — the LyX approach just isn’t very intuitive. I still don’t see why you should have to define all your targets explicitly.

And as for the first paragraph, well, I did say that it was good at what it did. My main criticism was that you still had to know TeX to use it fully, a comment I stand by.

Note, however, that all these comments are based on an old version of LyX. Before you ignore it I recommend you take a look at the new version.

LyX?s cross-referencing feature, criticised here, is in fact bar none. The reviewer didn?t think it worth his time to spend two minutes looking into the manual when he had a specific question. Look elsewhere for meaningful reviews of LyX.

However, in my case, as a mathematics phd student, my reports and articles simply have to be in the TeX format. Given that limitation I am always interested in a program that allows me to generate TeX without actually typing in all those silly commands.

Btw, I am a reasonable TeXer, but TeX is just not well suited to revising a piece of mathematics. It is not that bad to have to type in the equations, revising them later on is. For a year I have used scientific word for windows, which is also a graphical front-end to TeX and in all respects it is very similar to LyX. The one feature that, in my opinion, makes it even better than LyX is that it uses TeX as its native document-format, while LyX has to do conversions from and to TeX.

However, at my institute I can only use a sgi running Unix, so windows software is not an option. Therefore, for me LyX is the ideal solution. What is really great is that I can edit my math-documents at work and at home with exactly the same word-processor. For me LyX was the reason to install Linux on my home PC, so that I could compile the same LyX1.0.0 at home and at work. I must admit that I did not manage to compile LyX under RedHat 5.2, I had to switch to SuSe to get it to compile, probably I am doing something wrong with RedHat.