ComparingLyXAndWord

I tried to create an example with LyX and Word, both showing a layout that has been tweaked quite a bit, using the same font (Palatino) and also mostly the same settings. I tried to make the Word thing as good as possible, otherwise the comparision would not be fair.

IMO, although the word document might be considered "o.k." at first sight, that the LyX variant looks better. Why? The page "harmony" is better (due to LaTeX page breaking algorithm), the interword spacing is better in general, page breaking is more intelligent (two orphans in the word file), pdflatex's "font expansion" feature is being used (i.e., the fonts are being expanded/decreased insignificantly in some line to get a better line breaking), and finally: character protuding, i.e., the lines with hyphenation dashes are slightly shifted toward the margin, thus giving the impression of a more "harmonic" margin; actually, LyX did less hyphenations, which might be a result of the paragraph based line breaking algorithm. Then, LyX is doing a better job with different spacings (we have a thin space at "e.g.", normal interword spacing, and a larger space after punctuations (actually, this is also possible with word, but it is seldomly used). And so on.

Note also that the effort to produce such a layout in Word has been significantly higher than in LyX. And I think the real hassle begins when the document has >100 pages.