What is Evil Red Text (aka ERT)?
The acronym ERT (Evil Red Text) refers to raw LaTeX commands inserted into the body of your LyX document. In historical versions of LyX, ERT appeared in the user interface alongside regular text as red characters. “ERT” was coined on the developers mailing list by Larry Marso, who advocated an embedded raw LaTeX inset to hide raw LaTeX, and thus, to present a cleaner LyX user interface for complex documents. (see “A Brief History of ERT”, LDN, March 15, 2000). Finally, several years later, an ERT inset was included. With its long history of popular usage by the LyX community, the term “ERT” seems to have stuck as a description of raw LaTeX.
