## LyXing the Problem

16 March 2011

Last night and this morning, I used Writer2LAΤΕΧ to export the notes for my principal paper-in-progress from ODT format to a LAΤΕΧ file, imported that into LyX, and then spent some time cleaning things. This was in an attempt, which looks fairly successful, to overcome the problem that I now have of OpenOffice under RHEL failing to render various mathematical characters.

The results for the formulæ are not really WYSIWYG (nor does LyX seek to offer exactly a WYSIWYG display of formulæ), but they are close enough that, as I look at them, I don't have to spend most of my time thinking about the mark-up rather than thinking about the theoretical constructs that they are supposed to represent. (In fact, I'm one of those folk who prefers to word-process with the non-printing characters represented, and I'm quite comfortable with most of the extra stuff here in the representation of formulæ.) The symbols that I want are being rendered nicely, with the notable (but not egregious) exception of which is presently displayed as \defeq. (It's defined in a LAΤΕΧ document preamble as \stackrel{\mathrm{def}}{=}.)

I still have to learn more of my way around LyX but, barring some unexpected remedial action on the part of OpenOffice programmers, I will probably migrate to LyX for the production of technical documents.

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