New Members ⇒ New Daunted LaTeX/LyX user

[myrtilus]

Hi! I'm Di, a biology undergrad, hoping to use TeX, LaTeX, LyX etc to help make my reports and research papers look more appealing, and not to spend time rewriting bibliographies and TOCs.
However, I've only been toying around with LyX and LaTeX for about a week, and am still clueless (or, more accurately, a bit overwhelmed) at how to get the style to what I want it to be.
How do I (preferably in LyX running on Windows XP) actually customize
-the style of how my title is written (i.e. its font and position)
-the same for the author
-get the program NOT to show the date anywhere on the page!!!
-edit the elsevier article type so it DOESN'T show the "preprint submitted to Elsevier" thing
-edit any and all article/report/book classes so they do what I want?

And via which of the programs should I edit the layouts? LyX won't open its own layout files, and the code I see in TeXnic center doesn't match what's written in the LyX user manual.
Please, help.

And I'm sorry if this is a stupid post. But I really am at a loss here, and I don't want to go back to MS Word, for the life of me.
oh, and PS yeah, most of my writing is in Russian

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Myrtilus,

welcome to the board!
It could take some time to learn LaTeX, but it's worthwhile. Perhaps have a look into a good book. Have a look into "LaTeX Resources for Beginners", perhaps browse through links here.
I cannot explain LaTeX in a few words to you, that could be done by tutorials linked above, documentation, books. But I can tell you that you will get support here when you're encountering problems or if specific questions are arising.

Your general questions above could be answered extensively by tutorials. A really specific question (like that to Elsevier) could get an exact answer. But just use the forums search feature ("Elsevier"), that question has already been discussed.

Stefan