Paul wrote:
Mike Meyer wrote:
Is there an easy way to redefine paragraph styles in Lyx?
...
Well, you have sort of overlooked what I think is the point of
LyX/LaTeX. But we'll skip that.
The point being that authors should concentrate on content and logical
markup, and typesetters/publishers should worry about how the final
thing looks? Kind of (but not exactly) like the separation between HTML
and CSS?
I'm wearing my typesetting hat at the moment, so does that mean that Lyx
isn't really suitable for me - it's more designed for content creators?
The separation of content and layout doesn't mean that
lyx isn't for you. It merely means that the two jobs _can_
be split up in a comfortable way.
If an author use word, then the typesetting guy may have to
walk through the entire document to change the layout, by
actually changing paragraph types, indents, font sizes and such all
the way through.
If the author uses lyx, then the typesetting guy can simply
change the document class, perhaps add a thing or two to
the preamble, and be done with it. Of course, complicated
typesetting requirements _may_ take a long time to fulfill and
_may_ require a lot of latex knowledge. But still, the typesetting
work is supposed to be independent of the length of the
document!
So once you get the style right ,
it won't matter wether the book is 50 pages or 1500 pages. The
typesetter's job is done - without touching the text the author
prepared. And lyx/latex won't choke on the 1500 pages case either,
the printing step will merely need more time.
Getting the style right may be achieved merely by selecting
a good document class, or by adding a few lines to the preamble,
or in a worst case, adding several hundreds of lines of quite
involved latex code to the preamble.
The typesetter's job isn't so much in lyx, it is about setting up
the layout in latex (and optionally, in .layout files so the author can
select useful paragraph types.) Lyx is nice in that it allows this
kind of separation. Some of the typesetter's work is easily done
in lyx, such as electing the correct document class & options.
The rest mostly involves the preamble. Getting that right is no
easier (and no worse) with lyx than with other ways of dealing
with latex.
I've been looking at the "memoir" class and pure LaTeX and managed to do
some tweaks to the output. I'm doing a collection of short stories so
"chapters" is a bit of a misnomer, and each one has a different author
which makes things a bit complicated. But I think I'm getting there.
Thanks for the other info about layout files etc. I don't really mind
how it looks in LyX itself, so it seems like the book.cls file is the
one to check out. Seems like a steep learning curve, so thanks for
getting me started!
Sure, it can be a lot to learn. But then you know it, and the next
book gets much easier.
Helge Hafting
