LyX ⇒ Experienced typesetter, Lyx n00b

[randomroyalty]

I am coming from a long career in high-end typesetting, and currently using InDesign. I was recently turned on to Lyx for a planned publishing project, and I am looking for resources on moving from an environment like QuarkXpress or InDesign to Lyx.

A few things I have not been able to find out include:

- having fine control over H&J. I routinely adjust word and letterspace tolerances, and would like to continue doing so.

- optical alignment (hanging punctuation, etc.) One of InDesign's features whereby glyphs don't align necessarily by their bounding box (glyphs like A, W, T and punctuation actually hang outside the left and right column alignment limit). I could not find out if Lyx can actually do this.

Finally, can Lyx be part of an automated workflow? Mainly this is about taking an author's submission in Word or RTF (the likely file format), converting to Lyx then on to the pre-press stage as a PDF...with minimal human intervention.

[meho_r]

I am coming from a long career in high-end typesetting, and currently using InDesign. I was recently turned on to Lyx for a planned publishing project, and I am looking for resources on moving from an environment like QuarkXpress or InDesign to Lyx.

A few things I have not been able to find out include:

- having fine control over H&J. I routinely adjust word and letterspace tolerances, and would like to continue doing so.

Generally, LaTeX takes care of optimal hyphenation, so you don't have to worry about it a lot. But be aware, unlike other programs, it is more stict in this regard and will simply go in the margin with a word that cannot be hyphenated correctly and will not expand space between words above allowed value. It is on user to intervene in these cases. Because of this, you may enter "draft" as an option (in Document > Settings > Document Class > Custom) while working on a document to mark all those places with a black rectangle so they do not go unnoticed. When finished with editing and want to produce the final version of document, just remove word "draft" or replace it with word "final" so the rectangles are removed.

However, for more details about H&J, and customizing them, you may post a question in general part of this forum, since this is more LaTeX related than LyX.

- optical alignment (hanging punctuation, etc.) One of InDesign's features whereby glyphs don't align necessarily by their bounding box (glyphs like A, W, T and punctuation actually hang outside the left and right column alignment limit). I could not find out if Lyx can actually do this.

It is possible. Just load "microtype" package in the Preamble (Document > Settings > Preamble.) The example code you can use is as follows:

Code: Select all

\usepackage[protrusion=true,expansion,kerning,babel=true]{microtype}

For details, take a look at microtype documentation.

Finally, can Lyx be part of an automated workflow? Mainly this is about taking an author's submission in Word or RTF (the likely file format), converting to Lyx then on to the pre-press stage as a PDF...with minimal human intervention.

It depends on the state of the document. Sometimes it will work fine, but sometimes it will be more painful than exporting as .txt file and doing all things from scratch. The best result I got till now is using writer2latex plugin for OpenOffice.org and exporting .doc or .odf file to a plain LaTeX file and then importing that file in LyX. It gives much better result than imorting .doc or .odf in LyX directly. I personally still prefer exporting to a plain .txt file and working from scratch.

Notice that LyX is a good piece of software, but rather limiting. It is a good choice for start, but you may soon need a full-blown LaTeX editor which works directly with the source, like Texmaker, LEd, or Kile on Linux. It does depend on your needs of course.

And welcome to the forum

[randomroyalty]

Thank you for your quick and detailed response, and your warm welcome to the LaTeX community. You have given me a route to explore. However, to your knowledge, has anyone ever written anything about migrating from InDesign/QuarkXpress to LaTeX?

I personally still prefer exporting to a plain .txt file and working from scratch.

Ouch! This is what I was afraid of! Generally I am trying to avoid human intervention as much as possible. I am talking 1000s of manuscripts and I need to do this cost effectively (e.g. as much automation as possible).

What I am really trying to evaluate is whether the advantages of moving to LaTeX outweigh using the "industry standard" tools (InDesign).

So far LaTeX does a better basic composition (e.g. less fixing of bad lines) which will save a technical proofreading and revision. Ideally I would import or convert a word file and have 70-100% of the work done and ready for output.

[gmedina]

...What I am really trying to evaluate is whether the advantages of moving to LaTeX outweigh using the "industry standard" tools (InDesign)...

Well, if you're really trying to evaluate the advantages of moving to LaTeX, then give LaTeX a try, and keep away from (or blame) those self-denominated WYSIWYM editors.

[meho_r]

You see, if .doc or .odf document is structured well, use styles and careful formatting, you can get pretty good results when exporting to .tex (I'm still talking of writer2latex, sorry, don't know of better solution at the moment). I tested couple of large manuals written in OpenOffice.org Writer, with tables, images, footnotes, references... and almost no work had to be done after importing exported .tex file into one of the LaTeX editors (although the source file can look as a mess, but still no problems in output to .pdf). But if .doc file is a mess, don't expect to get much better result in LaTeX when exported (as the author of writer2latex said: "Garbage in, garbage out" )

And about what gmedina said, if you want to feel the real power of LaTeX, you'll eventually have to go from LyX to some of full-blown LaTeX editors as I mentioned earlier and work with source directly. However, I personally think LyX can be useful for people that are new to LaTeX, though rather limiting. It's up to you

So, simply install OpenOffice.org (it's free) and try writer2latex plugin to see if it's worth to go that way or not. Good luck.

[randomroyalty]

Thank you again for responding! Since I am trying to automate, I really don't care if I use Lyx or not.

However I am a bit concerned about importing .doc or .docx into ooWriter and then exporting to LaTeX. This seems to me adding an unneccesary step.

What I am thinking of is the following:

1. provide a .dot file with named styles and a validator macro. Authors will have to go through their documents and style properly, then validate before submitting. The reality is most people in academic settings (e.g. graduate students) are using Word.

2. use some sort of file converter on the Word file (or exporter) to convert it to LaTeX.

3. Use Lyx for any manual work, like tagging and creating the index.(mainly because indexers need something easy)

My alternative is to script InDesign using Javascript.

[meho_r]

You may search for "word to latex" then. I've found couple of converters like this or this, but I'm not sure if they'll do good since I do not use MS Office and Windows. You may try them and see if the result is satisfactory. Then you can repeat the process with OpenOffice.org Writer (despite being an unnecessary step) and compare results. I hope some Windows and MS Office users can provide more details.

For indexing, I think LyX will do.