On Feb 17, 2011, at 8:58 PM, Richard Heck wrote:
> On 02/17/2011 07:05 PM, Kuba Ober wrote:
>> Now I'm trying to add graphics to the page header in the document preamble,
>> and I'd
>> like to be able somehow to refer to the graphics file exported by LyX. What
>> I need
>> is a way of knowing that file foo.eps got exported as baz_bar_foo.eps to the
>> temp
>> directory.
>>
>> This also applies to not being able to, say, have an \includegraphics{foo}
>> in a LaTeX inset: LyX only processes graphics insets when exporting files,
>> it does not detect manually inserted \includegraphics.
>>
>> A solution to my problem would be either:
>> 1. how to "predict" (perhaps LyX could insert a macro for each exported
>> file?)
>> exported graphics file's name.
>>
> There's a specific routine in the LyX source that produces this "mangled"
> filename. You can have a look at it if you want to see how it works.
>
>> 2. how to force LyX to automagically process \includegraphics{} in LaTeX
>> insets,
>> document preamble, etc.
>>
> It's kind of LyX's policy that you are on your own as far as ERT, etc, is
> concerned. Parsing this stuff would be very difficult.
>
> That said, if the graphic is in some location LaTeX knows about---e.g., the
> same directory as the LaTeX file, or somewhere else that LaTeX can find
> it---then LaTeX will find it just as if you were running LaTeX manually on
> the file. So you don't need to refer to LyX's exported file but can just
> refer to your original.
The problem is that the LaTeX file is in a transient, temporary location that
LyX creates when exporting (say to dvi). There is no way for me to put anything
there.
This problem seems to apply not only to graphics, but to any file that's
included/referenced in ERT, document preamble, etc.
So, the general problem is thus: LyX prevents me from referencing any files
that it doesn't know about in the LaTeX output.
This completely breaks things that are easy when you use plain LaTeX: say that
you want to include graphics in the page header/footer. There's no way to do it
directly in LyX (or is there?), so you have to put the header
definition in ERT or in the preamble. But the files that I have in the
directory where the .lyx document resides are inaccessible to LaTeX unless LyX
knows about them and copies them into the temp directory!
In general case, you cannot refer to files outside of the directory where the
exported LaTeX file resides, since they may well contain spaces: this is simply
a mis-feature of LaTeX that LyX works around. It's just that the workaround is
not exposed in any way other than via the inset/include mechanism. It is also
impossible to know in general where the .lyx file resides: to refer to it from
the LyX's export directory you'd need a full path, and that may well be
anywhere on a user's system. Hardcoding the path, even if it contained no
spaces, still leaves you with broken output as soon as you move the .lyx file
anywhere, or send it to someone, etc.
I'm thinking of a following feature that would fix it:
A list of "extra" files in the document settings dialog, that LyX moves over to
the export directory along with other files it knows about (the exported LaTeX
output, [converted] graphics, etc). There would be two entries per file: the
full path, and the output (exported) file name. By default, the output file
name would simply be the path-less name of the source file. In case of
conflicts, numeric suffixes could be automatically appended. A checkbox would
enable a custom output file name in cases where it'd help.
Would this be something that could be accepted as a patch this late in the 2.0
cycle? I think I could give it a shot.
Cheers, Kuba
