Leo is a superb outliner, and consequently much harder to use than basic Lyx. It is worth considering for people who are highly oriented to structuring their textual content, and who like to make lots of notes, and work them into a constantly changing outline as they go. Its also ideal for anyone who is writing a book which treats the same subject from different perspectives in many different places, because the clone function makes doing this much easier. For this purpose it is probably unequalled. However, there is going to be a fairly steep learning curve, and one should be ready for several days effort to teach it, interspersed with practice. The difference is, with Lyx you can leave after an afternoon and be fairly confident that nothing terrible will happen. With Leo, it will take a lot more work to get to that point. Leo is also unashamedly a programming editor. This means that it doesn't quite look the part aesthetically - not to be underestimated. It may be more suitable for fiction writers than others. I would suggest looking at Leo if you have someone who is an instinctive outliner, is prepared to put the work in and will value cloning, and who is mainly interested in generating a finished document in text, and handing on the layout task to someone else.
Kate has about the same learning curve as a basic use of Lyx, but is much weaker in document structure features. There is no support for footnotes, chapters, sections. Not a problem if your author is a novelist, but a killer for many uses. For a novelist, the dual editing view into a document could be a great asset. Unlike Leo however, you don't get the ability to use this dual view as a collection of items on the same subject. Files generated with both Leo and Kate will have to be exported, and then imported into some other package, like OO or Lyx, for layout. Kate is worth considering seriously for fiction writers, and will be much better than stripped down editors like Gedit, which I have heard suggested to refugees from WP. It has a nice, clean, attractive, user interface.
If you recommend either Kate or Leo, be prepared to teach how to export the document into some other package for layout. If documents are going to be received in .doc format, you will also have to show how to import them into OO, and how to then get them out of OO and into Kate or Leo. This is probably not very sensible if its going to happen often.
OO has many of the document structure features found in Lyx, with all the traditional word processing features as well. It is notoriously large, slow to load, but is reported to be stable and not to lose material. The navigator and stylist work best as permanent floating windows, and for this a large screen is needed. If your author hasn't at least a 19 inch screen, get them one, and they'll find it worthwhile for this use alone. Outline mode is a bit clunky, but it does allow movement of sections of text around. It is very easy to insert graphics - and of course, sections, sub sections, footnotes etc are well supported. It has a fairly steep learning curve in itself, but for someone who is familiar with modern word processors, as most are now, this will be much reduced. If navigator and styles are used, its a good choice. The choice between this and Lyx are down to personal preference. Lyx will produce more professional layout with less effort, and will be faster and easier in composition - owing to the lack of any layout during composition. OO will be more familiar to people who are used to Office packages. If someone is going to be doing a lot of exchange of documents with people using MS Word, then OO is the only way to go. It should then be set up to save in .doc or .rtf format as a default.
KWord is a true frame oriented page layout package. It does classically what Lyx tries to avoid - it makes you lay out your pages in the course of composition. Not recommended for this purpose, though as a simple and powerful page layout program, it looks excellent.
Treeline is an interesting, complex and powerful program, arguably the best, or at least, most highly featured, of its kind, whose main use is for other purposes than book writing. These packages in general have a lot in common with outliners, but their lack of document structure features probably rules them out for recommendation for serious book writing for most people.
The Last Word
Well, this was written in Lyx and exported as ASCII. If you support an author, learn it yourself, and then teach them and have them try it. They and you may be surprised how easy life becomes when page layout is totally separated from the logical structuring of documents, and from the composition of content.
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