New Members ⇒ Ambitious LyX User

[insipidtoast]

I'm so glad I don't have to spend five years learning how to layout my book using InDesign or one of those other extremely expensive programs.

Instead, my research brought me here because of Lyx. I heard it was much simpler to use. I've been toying around with it, and it seems pretty easy, but also has a lot of kinks that are going to need to be figured out.

Also, thank you to whoever is responsible for creating and maintaining LyX as a freeware. That is so great! Much gratitude to you all.

My intention with this membership is to create one thread that will hopefully become a sticky. I am about 95% done with my manuscript, and then I need to figure out how to convert hundreds of separate word documents and jpegs into a single lyx file. I'd like the thread to become a sticky, to help answer some of the most common issues I run into, and so that other authors may have a handy reference thread to resolve those same issues.

Alas, before starting such a thread, I am going to read a few tutorials and other LyX guides.

Thanks for the exciting opportunity!

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the board!

We have a LyX forum, feel free to post questions and solutions there.

Just my opinion: LyX provides an easy start, but when you need a lot of customization I would recommend to use LaTeX. For example, it's very easy to speak about LaTeX problems: post problematic code, and we post code which is fixed. With LyX, people often vaguely describe a problem, and it's hard to give an answer (where and how to click?) - because LyX hides the code.

Stefan

[insipidtoast]

Thanks for the advice.

At first glance, what I plan to do is very simple:
1)Insert centered and scaled down images below the chapter title of the title page of a chapter. (that's what messed me up today, and it wouldn't allow me to view the pdf preview after I tried making that chapter title page).
e.g. Title
Image
Image
Image
(pagebreak)
New page: Starting the text of that chapter

2)Saving character styles from my word documents when I copy and paste them into the lyx document. The book is about plants, and latin names of plants need to be italicized. I had to manually change each latin name back to italics. Similarly, I also need to figure out how to preserve the data tables that are in my word documents. It would be great if I didn't have to recreate these things.

3)Creating two columns within my lyx document, but only at a certain part of the page. I want to place data tables next to each other, side-by-side, so I can save space and keep my page count down. Stacking data tables vertically that have 20+ rows each can take up a lot of page space.

Notice I said "At first glance." What do you suppose is the learning curve for all of this?

I'm planning on reading this guide:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/ly ... sh_lyx.htm
But that is from 2001 (11 years ago!) There has to be a more up-to-date guide. If you think I will have a difficult time formatting those three common attributes of my book using lyx, then I would appreciate if you could post some links about where to start with latex. I assumed there was a way to view all the latex code while using lyx. Isn't there?

I don't expect you to specifically address those three points I have outlined above, but I'm hoping they at least give you an idea of where I should go from here. Please give me some suggestions for what I should read. I just read a tutorial that was for an older version of lyx (I'm using 2.0) and I couldn't figure out some parts because the features were labelled/located differently.

This ebook also seems helpful: http://web.aanet.com.au/sage/lyx.pdf

Thank you

[Stefan Kottwitz]

I could recommend my LaTeX Beginner's guide for a fast-paced start.

However, there's much information freely available. Have a look here, a quick glance will show you which documents may be the best one for you to read: LaTeX Resources for Beginners.

Regarding your three points:

1. If it's similar for each chapter, I would define a style for this, using the titlesec package.
2. I would not manually italicize each plant name. Instead, I would define a macro such as \plant{name} and that macro does italicizing, that's the LaTeX way - whenever you decide to change the plant names style (slanted, bold, small caps, whatever) you just need to change that macro. Furthermore, if you plan to make an index, you could simply put an index command into the \plant macro. Try that with LyX without LaTeX code...
3. Sounds like you can simply use a {tabular} environment, or put two {minipage} environments next to each other, or use multicol.

Since this is the New Member's forum, I would not go into details here. It' better to deal with it in the LaTeX forum, and the best way is: one topic for each problem, with a clear title (not mixing several topics in a thread). If you plan to make a summary post later, that's fine, there you could list links to each erlier topic.

Stefan

[insipidtoast]

Are you familiar with those tutorials/ebooks in my previous post? Do you think those would be worth my while?

This isn't the place for details, so I just want to ask a quick (probably stupid) question here:
Those resources you provided are for latex (is there a separate program that is just latex?), how is it feasible to do those things inside of lyx?

I'm not so sure I want to learn much latex coding, because this book will probably be the only book I ever self-publish, and my layout requirements don't seem too advanced. Those three points I outlined are probably going to be my biggest challenges. That, and figuring out how to combine separate lyx documents into one big book. I was extremely excited when I copy and pasted one of my chapters, and then hit preview, and saw that it was all automatically aligned into an ebook format. So beautiful. So easy. There are just a few kinks that need to ironed out.

Yesterday, I was fiddling around with lyx, and read about a package called fancyhdr. So I checked my Miktex 2.9 packages, and saw that I had "fancyhdr." So, I did what the instructions said, and copied the coding or whatever into the LaTeX Preamble space of the Documents - Settings... area. Nonetheless I didn't notice any changes. Is that LaTeX Preamble the right place to enter the codes and stuff that you are talking about? I need to learn where to put in these "latex" codes so that I can accomplish those tasks.

Oh and also, I noticed that the rules say to post code of the problem I'm having. Where can I find that code? Do I copy and paste the part where it says "view entire log" That seems like a lot of text. There are parts in red every once in a while - do I only post that red text?