So inspired by this blog post (German) and the therein linked, not uninsightful comment about how stupid Office text processing (and how awesome LaTeX) is, and generally being a friend of OSS, I decided to jump the gun and install something to that end.
Now, looking for reasonable GUIs (because I’m just too old to hack anything without a comfortable environment) I stumbled upon LyX, which seems to be reasonably comfy. It runs now, after an afternoon of shouting and crying, so I decided I’d make a little tutorial as to how exactly you’ll have to install it.
My Windows Vista Business (32-Bit) is German, so bear with me regarding the screenshot texts.
Update 2009-03-25 13:41: There is a Windows Installer now, which still takes some time to install and requires various steps, but has some message boxes guiding you through the process. It’s still in beta, but worked a treat on my Windows XP machine.
Which LyX? And What Else?
Now, first off, there are two installation packages for LyX (which you find on the Wiki). At the time of this writing, do not download the one linked on the download page. The installer you want is (currently) this one:
LyX-1.5.6-1-Installer-Bundle.exe (95 MB)
(There might be a newer version on the Wiki, so check back there if you access this post later than September 2008.)
The non-bundle installer tries to download MiKTeX during the installation, which is nice, but it obviously does so with an outdated URL, yielding a 404 (not found) error:
404 Error
The installation will complete despite this error, but you won’t have a LaTeX frontend, but just … a standalone editor without any exporting functionality, basically worth nil.
Keep in mind that despite the LyX setup telling you it can use an existing MiKTeX installation, that’s simply not true, as it looks for a tex.exe file, which the current distribution of MiKTeX just doesn’t include. So don’t download MiKTeX individually either, unless you don’t plan to use the LyX frontend.
So just install the bundle from the start.
Installation
OK, now that you have the proper file, it’s time to install it. You will need to install it as administrator, as the installation process will otherwise abort after 30 minutes (more in this later). So right-click the file, “Run as Administrator”.
Run as Admin
OK, enter your credentials if you use UAC, and off you go. Select “Install MiKTeX”, UI language and dictionaries, select a directory and start. You’ll probably want to install it for all users. The LyX installation itself will be over rather quick, although you’ll have to agree to each dictionary’s terms of use individually.
After a minute or so, the MiKTeX license agreement will pop up, tick “I accept” and off goes the long part. First, select whether you want to install MiKTeX for all users or just yourself – choosing the same here as for LyX is wise – and a directory.
Now, the next question for settings seems rather innocent, but I strongly suggest switching “install missing packages” to “yes” (I’ll write about why yes and not “ask every time” a bit below, selecting “no” doesn’t make much sense since you want a working program):
Install Missing Packages
Good, start. You will see the following screen for quite some time now:
LyX installing MiKTeX
After about 15 minutes on my mobile Core2 with 2GHz, you will need to push “Next >” after the completion of the MiKTeX setup, to continue the LyX setup. Now, if you didn’t select “Yes” above, a plethora of package installation dialogs will pop up – and grab focus, so if you happen to install happily, and do something else while the computer is milling, you might screw up your installation with a careless key press.
Just imagine, you happily type a blog post, and then you cancel the running installation because that blog post would’ve contained a “C” next when the popup grabs focus. Yes, experience speaking (although, OK, it must’ve been me panicking and pushing “Escape” instead).
Package Installation
OK, so you haven’t screwed up. Another 20 minutes, and you will be greeted with an inviting image. If you started as administrator, that is, otherwise the installation routine will abort right here with an error and leave you with half a program installed.
LyX Driver Error
Don’t worry, it’s just Vista being paranoid about the Metafile to EPS Converter, a printer driver that’s installed in the course of this setup. “Install anyway” is the way to go.
Now, you’re nearly done. Close the setup (without checking the “run LyX immediately” box, unless you want to run it as administrator, too), and start LyX from the start menu. You will need to provide your UAC credentials yet again upon running LyX for the first time, since it does some further installation stuff for your standard user.
LyX Installed!
Conclusion
In all honesty, I didn’t expect to spend an entire afternoon (well into the evening) installing a working LaTeX environment. It works now it seems, and I’m looking forward to writing things in a WYSIWYM typesetting system instead of a WYSIWYG word processor (where you don’t quite get what you see after all, and it’s easy to focus on presentation over content or structure). But the way there could have been less annoying.
Disclaimer: This isn’t the first time I’m writing something with LaTeX, the last time I wrote in a text editor with just basic highlighting. But that’s over five years ago – I do hear though that templating hasn’t gotten a lot easier since. I’ll now write a “test” 15 page paper with this first, before I fully delve into my diploma thesis. If this test doesn’t prove successful by my yet to be determined standards, which may include those dreaded custom styles (anybody has good documentation on .sty files?), off I am to OpenOffice with TinyPDF again.
September 22nd, 2008 @ 22:34
Thanks for the hints. It’s strange that it takes so many steps and precautions. I never installed LyX on Vista, but will likely do so in a couple of weeks.
If you need a thesis template, you might want to take a look at these and adjust them accordingly:
http://www.numlock.ch/variouspapers/ifi_thesis_template/
September 22nd, 2008 @ 23:20
Thanks a lot for the template link!
I’m not absolutely certain if the program would run after an installation with errors – it’s certainly possible that it would and only some functionality would be affected (for example, after the installation without MiKTeX, saving worked, just exporting as PDF or other formats didn’t).
I guess it’s the price we pay for an open source product with so many parties involved…
Thanks for your comment too, by the way
September 22nd, 2008 @ 23:40
True, setting up a nicely working LaTeX/LyX environment on Windows can be cumbersome. On Linux (and IIRC also on Mac OS X) it tends to be easier thanks to package management.
BTW, I’ve corrected some broken URLs on the page and in the ZIP file and removed the “attribution” clause in the readme.txt and license.txt files.
September 23rd, 2008 @ 1:01
Very nice, thanks
I’m working on the paper at the office, so I’ll wait with downloading until tomorrow
September 23rd, 2008 @ 13:51
you should also give LEd or TeXnicCenter a try, they’re both more powerful than Lyx (in terms of WYMIWYG…), and let you focus quite a bit more on the content than on presentation…
September 23rd, 2008 @ 14:09
Hm, OK … admittedly, I’m already in the middle of writing now (after gladly having put the editor woes behind me for now), so I’m a bit scared of breaking the flow that brought me to 5 pages on the first day of actual writing already
I’ll certainly give them a try before I delve into the diploma thesis itself though, thanks!
October 28th, 2008 @ 21:06
Thank you for the advice, especially which version to download. Initially, I used the bundle from a mirror site off of the download page. BIG MISTAKE! The Metafile to EPS converter hijacked my ability to print from ANY program.
I followed yr advice and everything works great. Thank you again.
October 29th, 2008 @ 14:14
Not a problem, glad to have been of help
And thanks for the comment!
November 23rd, 2008 @ 12:28
Something is still “broken” in the LyX installation.
I Spent from midnight until 3 a.m. this morning installing LyX only to find the same thing: it was unable to download MiKTeX during the installation. (Dare I say that perhaps we hav been spoiled by MS istallations that now seem to work so seemlessly? I remember the days when installing a printer meant wriing your own driver. However, I do now expect better than this.)
I subsequently down loaded MiKTeX separately. Then went to bed. Before installing MiKTeX, I decided to check the internet for advice on whether I could install MiKTeX after lyX. In the absence of any better advice than yours,
I will uninstall LyX re-download the whole package and start again.
I am a technical author used to putting content into strictly controlled pre-set print formats (and SGML/XML) in high-end applications such as FrameMaker. I am not sure LyX will be rigorous enough for me, but I try to keep an eye on what’s developing around the new technologies.
November 23rd, 2008 @ 13:54
Hm, OK … I was a little put back by the whole installation routine hugeness as well. I guess it’s the fate (and potential bane) of open source software though that the developers often care more about the application itself than its installation or user-friendliness…
LaTeX isn’t exactly new by the way though
It’s been around since 1980.
The thing about it not being able to download MiKTeX is exactly one of the problems I experienced as well by the way: It seems MiKTeX meanwhile moved (since the installation routine was programmed) and thus it’s not possible to install on-the-fly, and you have to download the entire LyX package that includes MiKTeX (link in the post).
Good luck, and let me know if it worked!
Oh, and FrameMaker has quite a different focus from LaTeX. Customizing the layout in LaTeX is pretty hard and can get very technical, it’s best used for stuff it was built to be used for – scientific publications – FrameMaker originally evolved partially as a way to showcase the great graphical possibilities of Sun workstations. As such, arguably LaTeX is structurally more rigid than the FrameMaker XML. Also, LaTeX enforces structure way more than FrameMaker does, because while FrameMaker was a graphical publishing package that had structure slapped on top in recent releases (starting 2002 it seems), LaTeX evolved from structure to a software package. Keep in mind that I have no clue and never actually worked with FrameMaker myself, but those differences in approach have to be kept in mind or you will be disappointed
November 23rd, 2008 @ 20:30
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I just felt the need to concur with you over download difficulties and and, in fact, the disjointed and confusing info on the wiki site.
Yes, LaTeX has been araound a long time, mostly in the acedemic and programing world: I have never had much interest in it. Still don’t, really – it’s the editors I’m looking at.
In the aircraft industry, I have worked with highly structured information all my life (from 10 pitch OCR-B daisywheel output to SGML manuals with >2Million hyperlinks), and FrameMaker does a pretty good job there. Far better tham MS Word etc. Which is why it is so popular in the industry.
However, no harm in checking out the alternatives now and then, especially since XML with HTML output are the name of the game now and are a long way from the paper distributions where every page had a different issue date on it. That is where FrameMaker really scored.
Anyhow, I don’t have anything to disagree with you about. It might be that LyX will be better (and cheaper) for my needs if it is easier to set up for SGML/XML. FrameMaker is quit onerous to set up.
I won’t be checking it out this week now though: I am currently converting completely inconsistent WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x docs to FrameMaker or Word via Open Office. In the document I have open at this moment, I have found 67 page headers – all the same. there were 9 different fonts called up none of them used. The one font that is used, is called up in almost every paragraph and in 120 cells of one table. It only needs to be there once at the begining of the document. These docs are so inconsistent that any form of atomatic translation is out of the question. Hence the interest in a low cost, but stable, editor that takes the formatting out of the hands of the author and lets them build content only. If you know of any others I can check out I’d be pleased to hear about them.
November 23rd, 2008 @ 23:22
That conversion job sounds awful, and like a huge lot of work. Good luck in trying out alternatives then – it’s very possible that FrameMaker ends up being better-suited to your task after all, but you never know
There’s other LaTeX editors, LyX is quite limited – but works perfectly for scientific thesis, I kept it after the thesis I installed it for and am using it for the diploma thesis as well now. Honestly, I haven’t looked further after finding it good enough, I’m lazy like that
And thanks a lot for your comments!
November 25th, 2009 @ 6:18
it works! thank so much 4 d tips!!