LyX is a modern approach of writing documents with a computer which breaks with the tradition of the obsolete typewriter concept. It is designed for people who wants a professional output with a minimum of time effort, without becoming specialists in typesetting. Compared to common word processors, LyX will increase the productivity a lot, since most of the typesetting will be done by the computer, not the author. With LyX the author can concentrate on the contents of his writing, since the computer will take care about the look.
Technically this is done by the combination of the comfortable usage of a word processor with the high quality of a real typesetting system. LyX uses the most popular and in our opinion best typesetting system available: LaTeX. It is used for a wide range of documents, especially in science. It is for example difficult to find a mathematics or computer science book that is not done with LaTeX. So some people claim that its main purpose is mathematic typesetting. This isn't true. It is as good for writing letters, articles or any kind of book, and often much better than common word processors. What prevents some people from using this powerful free system, which is available on almost every computer system, is the difficult usage. With plain LaTeX the author enters the wishes for typesetting as commands into the text. There means no visual feedback whether things are OK or not. It is also difficult to read these documents before they have been printed, so online editing isn't easy. This is where LyX enters the game.
LyX proposes an almost WYSIWYG-view of the document. "Almost" means that the line- and page-breaks are not displayed as they will be in the printed document. But this isn't necessary, since LyX helps you to write portable documents with the generic mark up concept. With this concept, the typesetter (LaTeX) has enough information to break your text in a very nice manner. So line- and page-breaks aren't your problem anymore. This means thath you don't have to care about the rest of the document, when you do changes at the beginning. Neither do you need to do low-level formatting such as "large bold italic modern font and a little space above and below", but rather you simply choose a so-called "layout" or "style" or "environment" for each paragraph. This also gives you complete reusability of your documents: without any deeper changes you can print them with another paper size or in two columns or with landscape orientation. Or just switch the main font (maybe you don't want a serif-font for the online version of your document in the WWW). Or just cut some paragraphs from an older document (maybe from an article) and paste them in a new one (maybe a letter): The look will always fit without any manual labour. Of course you can also do some low-level formatting at your own risk, but the usual way with LyX is to tell what the text is, not what it should look like. In a sense LyX gives you WYSIWYM editing (What You See Is What You Mean).
Currently, LyX uses the XFORMS library as a toolkit. LyX should run everywhere, where XFORMS runs. This is on all major Unix platforms as well as PC platforms, including Sun, SGI, HP, DEC Alpha/OSF, IBM RS6000, Convex, Cray, i386/Linux, Alpha/Linux, i386/FreeBSD, i386/NetBSD, DecSystem(mips)/Ultrix and others.
The following options can be used to define the colors to use for different things:
Furthermore, LyX understands the following generic command line options from the Forms Library:
~/.lyxrc Personal configuration file
LIBDIR/system.lyxrc System wide configuration file
LIBDIR/chkconfig.ltx Updates LyX if LaTeX config has changed
LIBDIR/bind/ Keybindings
LIBDIR/clipart/ Clipart pictures
LIBDIR/doc/ Documentation in LyX format.
LIBDIR/examples/ Example documents
LIBDIR/kbd/ Keyboard mappings
LIBDIR/layouts/ Layout descriptions
LIBDIR/templates/ Templates for documents
LIBDIR/tex/ Extra TeX files
LIBDIR/CREDITS Credits file
LIBDIR is the system directory. This is usually /usr/local/lib/lyx.
Full documentation in either native LyX or postscript format.