On 20 Feb 2009, Steve Litt wrote: > On Friday 20 February 2009 09:35:27 am Anthony Campbell wrote: > > I'm just starting to prepare my fourth book with Lyx, this time using > > 1.6.1 instead of 1.5.x. > > Anthony, > > What were your other three books? Are you self-publishing them, were they > published by others, or were they books used internally by an organization? > Are their descriptions/sales-brochures viewable on the Internet? > > What challenges did you have to overcome in order to write books with LyX, > and > in what ways was LyX a pleasant surprise? Do you have any tips you can give > others who write books using LyX? > > If you, I and a few others answer these questions, it might make life easier > for lots of people trying to write books in LyX.
[snip] The three books I have out at present are described on my website: Homeopathy in Perspective, The Assassins of Alamut, Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination. I had been using Latex for a long time before this, including for book writing, and an reasonably au fait with it, though far from an expert. I still write letters and shorter stuff in Latex since I have the templates ready. I started using Lyx as an experiment because I was finding it difficult and time-consuming to include pictures in the text with wrap-around using Latex. I'm now fully persuaded of the value of Lyx for books. I would not say there have been any major problems, apart from some issues with including the Preface in the TOC and things like that. This list is extremely useful and helpful in sorting them out. My policy generally is Keep it Simple, so I mostly accept the defaults in the Book Class and don't try to be clever. What I particularly value in Lyx is the ability to make footnotes easily. I regret the demise of the footnote in printed books and it's a delight to be able to have as many as I like at the touch of a button. Aother thing I like is that I can get an instantaneous preview of a page which shows me exactly how it will look in the book. Making the index is also easy. As regards my method of working, I don't generally compose the text directly in Lyx. I write in vim (gvim) which I'm used to and which allows me to make large-scale changes quickly and easily. When I've got the text more or less as I want it, I then import it into Lyx and carry on from there. Anthony -- Anthony Campbell - a...@acampbell.org.uk Microsoft-free zone - Using Debian GNU/Linux http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews, and sceptical articles)
