Chapter 2. Introduction

Do you want to create professionally formatted documents? Tired of always having to change the font settings, to insert or delete pagebreaks, to format your text for printing, monitor, or web view? Do you find yourself spending hours of your life into formatting issues that you wish you never had to be conftonted with? Did you, during your editing efforts, ever get the uncomforting feeling that you are inventing the wheel for th 39th time?

Well, in fact you are! This document will show you how to use the power of Open Source tools like LyX (3) and sgmltools (4) to create the documents you've dreamed of, while, as a nice side effect, concentrating on what deserves most of your attention: Content, not Formatting! I will describe a method by which all you have to do is to write your document in LyX, then run the . lyx file through a script that will produce the SGML source and, from it, the HTML, TXT, RTF, PDF and PS formatted documents, complete with table of contents, embedded pictures, fonts, thumbnails (for PDF) and other goodies.