Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX [LWN.net]

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 27, 2025 11:19 UTC (Mon) by quietbritishjim (subscriber, #114117)
In reply to: Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX by paulj
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

Another vote for LyX. As you say, the live preview of equations are very good. It feels essentially like you're just editing the PDF directly.

For that reason, I honestly think LyX is good even for advanced LaTeX users, despite often being pitched (dismissively) at beginners. It has a few "escape hatches" to raw LaTeX for anything not natively supported by LaTeX. I started using LyX after a decade use LaTeX and found it was much faster write in (by a factor of 3 in the one course I half-wrote in LaTeX then re-wrote in LyX) and unbeatable for editing an almost complete document (like my PhD thesis!). It does have potential for a bit of a competency gap though, where you might struggle if you've only ever used LyX then need an advanced LaTeX feature having not learnt the basics.

Perhaps if Typst really takes off then someone will make a LyX-like editor for it. (Maybe even me, one day!)

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Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 28, 2025 10:43 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

> I honestly think LyX is good even for advanced LaTeX users

Yes, it's excellent even if you're an advanced LaTeX user. Lyx will always let you "bug out" to the "Evil Red Text" (ERT) box and just write LaTeX if you want. I did a dissertation in Lyx that had a good bit of custom LaTeX macros, to use in math boxes, and other stuff. Indeed, you can easily *extend Lyx itself* and add support for your own macros in the menu system with just a small little text definition file - so even my own macros had Lyx support. ;)

It's an amazing tool Lyx.

There is extensive documentation, from a tutorial to a reference. Which is of course written in Lyx, so you can see exactly how it's done things. :) I.e., there is both a description of how to do something and there is the thing itself in Lyx, in the doc. ;)

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 28, 2025 11:17 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, another great feature of Lyx, which makes it such a _huge_ time-saver for writing LaTeX no matter how advanced you are:

You can include all kinds of graphics into your document, and Lyx knows to auto-convert many many formats into something LaTeX can use, if it isn't already such a format. If there's a format it doesn't know, you can just add your own auto-conversion command into the settings. So I was able to just insert Dia diagrammes into my Lyx document, and *Lyx would just convert it to SVG and be able to display my diagramme in the screen*.

If writing raw latex you have to remember to do this all yourself, whether that's manual and remembering to update your SVGs whenever you update a source diagramme file; or writing a makefile.

Also, Lyx makes the "tweak image size-specification relative to page/column/box, and tweak placement, compile, check, adjust" cycle so much faster.