The LyX Graphical Tour

These pages illustrate how to create and edit a simple LyX file. The goal is to allow you to fairly evaluate how LyX works and whether it is a right choice for you. Since we often hear of misimpressions like "LyX seems too much like [insert large, monopolistic company's word processor here]. Yuck!" or "LyX seems too much like LaTeX. Yuck!", and since we aim to be better than either :-), it's only fair that we show how LyX really works. If you ever edit anything longer than a single sentence, you owe it to yourself to try it out.

[Note: to avoid completely trashing your browser, all screenshots have been reduced to a height of 128 pixels. However, there are still 74 total shots in the 5 pages, so it will take a while to load. Click on the images to get a life-sized version --- I strongly suggest you use the middle mouse button (in Netscape) to open the image in a new browser window to avoid losing your place.]

Explanatory text	Screen View	Paper View
The startup screen of LyX is simple enough. After a nifty splash screen, you will get the following:
To open a file, click on File, then Open (or New).
In the file dialogue box (which is used in many different places in LyX), simply type the name of the file or double-click on the name in the browser.
This will open up the basic editing screen (note that I use a non-default color background).
Let us start by typing in the title (on the left). If we were to print the document at this point or preview the file (File->View dvi), this is what a US Letter paper sheet would look like (on the right).
Now let's tell LyX that this is a title. Note that we don't tell it to center it or to make the font larger and bold. LyX takes care of all that automatically. Simply click on the format menu (below File, and it has the default value of "standard"), then on "Title".
As you can see, LyX does the "right thing". Note that the date is added automatically - you don't have to do anything.
Now let's add the author; type in the name
scroll down the format menu to find "author" and click it
and again, LyX does the right thing.