Hello,
I want to write the documentation of a in house application, and be able
to produce PDF, Html and print copies. Our documentation will include a
lot of color snapshots.
A solution would have been to use MS Word. But I'm not pleased with the
html produced; and I can't do version control on MS .doc files. And also
I would prefeer a linux based solution :)
Another solution seem to be latex based, and we found Lyx.
CVS works well on .lyx files; lyx can handle huge files (I made my phD
few years ago with MSWord, and I definitely KNOW MSWord does not handle
huge (200pages) files).
The only weakness I see (after several hours trying lyx -I'm using
1.1.6fix2) is about images. You can import .eps files, but a 20K PNG
file turns into a 1MB eps file.
Recently (1.1.16fix2?), you can import images ("Insert... External
Material... Click on ChessDiagram to change the template to
RasterImage, choose your {jpeg|gif|png...} image (how about a button on
the main toolbar, or a keyboard shortcut, or an item in the Insert menu
"Insert bitmap" ?).
But you can't see it in lyx (only a button "Bitmap: myface.png", button
that pops up its dialog each time you click on it... is it possible to
get the dialog only with double-clik ? when I select-cut-paste some
text, I must be very carefull where I click to avoid all these
dialogs :).
How can I see a preview of my images in Lyx (I've a lot of them) ?
What are the best image format ? We want to have small image files ( gif
:( jpeg png (we've also our application's icons in xpm format, can we
use them 'as it' ? seem that the export to html produces for all the
icons.xpm a file ".png" (no filename, only an extention))
It's very important for us to produce html (and lyx's export is nice :)
that uses the image we provide (jpeg or png), to avoir conversions,
dithering etc...
The PS or PDF export can convert the images, it's less important for us.
The View menu in lyx, when you choose 'html', creates a .html file in a
temp directory, then launch netscape. That's fine, but the all the
images are missing (I import my images in lyx as ../icons/myface.jpg
). A workaround is to export as html (creates a .html file near my .lyx
file, so the image links are ok, except for .xpm that are translated to
".png" files (filename lost).
What about a little "HOW-TO" about lyx, images and conversions ?
It's the first time for years that I find a global solution for
documentation: cvs working on master file ; html output, pdf output, ps
output.... should we be able to preview bitmaps in lyx... we reach then
a definite solution !
Congratulations for the work on Lyx
Olivier Tubach.
PS: I would be glad to receive advices about large, full of images and
links documents: sould I split it in several .lyx files ?
About the html export, is it possible to produce a different html file
for each part of my lyx document ?
thanks in advance for any help !
