I’ve begun writing up my paper on a low-cost control architecture for mobile robots based on DAvinCi and I wrote it in Word 2007. As good as it is, it is troublesome to export to a different format while retaining the document’s functionality. So I’ve decided to go back a decade and use LaTeX. However, this time round, I found Lyx.

Lyx is a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX and is my favorite tool beside Word 2007 for writing papers. While Word 2007 now accomplishes most of the benefits of LaTeX had for writing technical papers, when it comes to laying out tables, figures, captions and references, LaTeX still triumphs.

Now Lyx does to LaTeX, what Arduino did to 8 bit microcontrollers i.e. makes it easier and fun to use. While the setup is straight forward in Windows, a few additional packages need to be installed in linux (Ubuntu 9.1) to get access to all the style classes especially the .cls for IEEE Transactions in my case.

To ensure that Lyx is ready for technical publishing, open up a terminal window and paste the following code:

sudo apt-get install lyx texlive texlive-latex-extra texlive-math-extra texlive-science texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-publishers

After installing these packages, reconfigure Lyx by going to Tools->Reconfigure and restart Lyx. Now you should be ready to create a document using the IEEE Transactions layout. Choose article(IEEEtran) as your document class under Document->Settings.

I would like to credit Rob at rrfx.net for the idea. He originally published the tip for Ubuntu 9.04 here.