I'm a Unix user, but have to set up 2 windows computers for LyX. The 1.3.5 edition of Lyx for Win32 works very well as far as I can tell. I can enter equations and view them in dvi. For some reason, yap always opens minimized, but that's OK by me.
I think the troubles I find are caused by the fact that the user home dir has spaces in it. User home directories are in C:\Documents And Settings\username. Users want to put lyx files under "My Documents" in there and then lyx does not work there. So, what to do?
Has anybody found a way to reconfigure windows and rename the home dir to C:\DocumentsAndSettings for all users?
In Edit/Preferences/Path, I changed the working directory to C:\Windows\Temp. But it will not do to have all users writing in there.
I've tried using '\ ' and '%20' in lieu of spaces, but neither worked consistently. I've also tried the "8.3" version of the path name, but it contains a tilde that throws off some Unix tools. Finally gave up and created a separate, space-free path for LyX docs.
As a workaround until the much-anticipated 1.3.6 arrives, you might set up separate LyX doc directories for each user (with user-specific permissions, if desired) and then use a file synchronization utility to synch a user's LyX directory with an appropriate subdirectory under My Docs. I use SynchronX, but there's a few of them out there.
Pdf output fails, no matter what i do. It fails either if I want to view in acrord32 or save to disk. I believe it is due to path problems, because lyx keeps creating a directory C:\Documents but that is empty.
Sounds likely. One other thing to keep in mind about PDFs on Windows v. Unix (using Acrobat Reader): if you try to View->PDF (regular, dvipdfm or pdflatex) while Reader is open, the operation will fail with an error message saying that Reader can't find the file. There are two workarounds: either close Reader before issuing View->PDF, or set up a custom export command 'acrord32 %%FName' and then use File->Export->Custom to "export" the PDF to Reader (which will display it even if Reader is already open). And speaking of Windows quirks, you can't type 'acrord32 %%FName' into the File->Export->Custom dialog for some reason; you have to manually hack your preferences file and insert the line
custom_export_command "acrord32 %%FName"
(one more reason 1.3.6 is *eagerly* anticipated).
-- Paul
