On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Ayesha Badhwar wrote:
> I work in the Production Department of a scientific journal and we use
We need more people like you! An insider who can make some noise and push
LyX onto their contributors desktops.
> Latex 2.09 for our scientific papers.
But the world needs less of these and more updating to LaTeX-2e.
> Would Lyx be useful for us?
Would it ever! The trouble is LaTeX-2.09 is not worth supporting (LaTeX
maintainers say so) so you need to either get a LaTeX-2e class produced or
make a simple wrapper class that uses your existing 2.09 style. There
are a couple of 2.09 classes that we support using wrapper classes which
are included in the LyX distribution. Producing a simple wrapper for the
AGU classes should be a matter of copy and paste.
LyX offers you the ability to define a template document for your
contributors to fill in the blanks with and should make producing papers
for your journal a lot simpler since LyX takes care of calling latex and
bibtex etc. for you.
One problem though is that a file needs to be created that tells LyX which
environments the AGU class has and how they should be represented on
screen. These are fairly easy to do but there are no tools to assist in
this unfortunately. However, many document classes have similar layouts
so a new class can be adapted quickly by copying an existing file and
renaming a few things within it. There is plenty of documentation on this
process and the lyx-users list provides good support also.
> How can I try it out? We use Windows OS and Unix platform.
Windows:
There are instructions, other info and a package to install on
Windows here:
http://www.fh-hannover.de/mbau/tim/hentschel/lyx/index.htm
Unix:
You'll probably have to compile from source unless you have a linux box in
which case there are rpm's available from ftp://ftp.sylvan.com/pub/lyx
(you'll need the xforms rpm and the tetex-lyx also). These are also on
most ftp mirrors of the main LyX ftp server: ftp://ftp.lyx.org which is
probably best reached as ftp://ftp.via.ecp.fr/pub/lyx at the moment.
On the ftp site there is a binary for Solaris-2.7 but not much else other
than Linux distributions for recent LyX releases. Of course you'll always
find the source there.
Allan. (ARRae)
