http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17373/Lyx-the-Multi-Platform-Document-Editor/
I wrote a quick overview of Lyx for tech news site OSNews. It's not a
comprehensive overview as I decided to focus on some of the features
that I personally make the most use of.
Most of the article was written in 1.5.0beta. I started it in 1.4.4
while 1.5.0beta was compiling in the background (although I had some
experience with 1.5.0SVN). OSNews require submissions to be web ready
with only a subset of tags. I use the following converter string to
export 2.0 HTML.
noexist $$i ;latex2html -no_auto_link -no_navigation -html_version 2.0
-no_subdir -info 0 --split 0 $$i
At that point, I still have to do a bit of hand editing. To begin with,
OSNews don't accept <h1> etc tags so I have to change them to <b> tags
instead. As I am working with mark-up, this isn't a big deal as I can
simply do a find and replace on "H1" to change it to "B".
OSNews require that the HTML have no line breaks in the middle of
paragraphs. Basically, using Kwrite, I have to highlight each paragraph
by hand and do a <ctrl+j> on it to make it into one line.
Another problem is that the html exporter creates paragraphs that open
with <P> but with not corrisponding </P> tag to close. This isn't
strictly in keeping with the OSNews submissions guidelines but they have
not complained so far (four articles for that site).
I added plain English remarks to indicate where I wanted the images to
be inserted. I have to hand add HTML hyper links as I have not found a
tool that can export them intact from HTML. I usually add them as
hypertext URLs from within Lyx and then hand correct them in the text
editor.
Quick tip for anyone who might be attempting a similar exercise in Lyx:
don't be tempted to hand create section headings with the bold attribute
to ease HTML conversion. I made that mistake with an earlier, 6,000 word
article. In short, I ended up going through hell on earth, simply to
save five minutes of search and replace and hand-checking at the end.
BTW, I also used a mind mapping tool called Kdissert to plan the
article. Picture of the mind map here:
http://www.rhyder.34sp.com/lyx_tree.png
As ever, much gratitude to the Lyx team.
--
http://www.unmusic.co.uk - about me, music, geek sitcom etc.
http://www.unmusic.co.uk/amhs/ - alt.music.home-studio
