On Jul 13, 2011, at 1:58 PM, Richard Heck wrote: > On 07/13/2011 10:48 AM, Torquil Macdonald Sørensen wrote: >> On 13/07/11 16:38, Anders Host-Madsen wrote: >>>> My ability to make documents look the way I want them to is limited. >>> >>> In my personal opinion, this is the weakness of LaTeX/LyX. >>> LaTeX is great when you write for a medium >>> with a defined formatting, e.g., a journal, and they give you a >>> style file to use. Then you just fill out the >>> contents. But if you a free to format your document, and have >>> specific ideas on how it should look like, it's >>> not that convenient. I found the easiest way is to use >>> LaTeX packages such as enumitem, fancyhdr, and >>> titlesec. Once you have formatted one document, you >>> can use it as template for following documents. >>> >> >> Not to imply that LyX is lacking in any way in this area (simply >> because I don't know), but I know that LyX is at least great for >> people like me, who are completely content to use a >> basic/default/ordinary LaTeX formatting :-) I just use it in order to >> have the power of LaTeX with less difficulty and better readability >> while I write. >> >> So I'm glad that I can automatically get a great looking document >> without having to do any "formatting work". >> > Let's put it this way: If you want every document you write to look > different, then LaTeX is not your tool. But if you want to write (edit, > publish) a lot of documents that look pretty much the same, then LaTeX > is exactly your tool. Of course there are times for creative > presentation, and there are other tools for that. But LyX (to return to > it) is intended primarily for academic and technical writing, where > content is the main thing and presentation is secondary, and most of us > are perfectly happy to have a fairly small number of choices as far as > presentation is concerned.
Thanks Richard, Torquil, and Anders, I think Richard has described my case. I routinely create only a few types of documents. I mentioned them in my original post. My formatting is as simple as I can make it, with sensitivity primarily to alerting readers to transitions and producing a neat not unattractive document. My formatting preferences are definitely minimalist. I have no interesting in making every document look different. I've finished the tutorial, even the math section, though the likelihood that I will ever need to format any formulas or equations is slim. My thought now is to check out classes for the simplest types of documents from at least a couple families. I would not be surprised that one of the letter classes could be tweaked into the simplest type of document I create, which I also described in my original post, and then saved as a template. That would solve the problem of a large portion of my writing. The thought is that I could then gradually work into those that are only slightly more complicated. I suspect my greatest challenge will be learning to do citations and bibliography, especially getting a references/citations/bibliography manager to work together with LyX. [In that connection does LyX work with BibDesk? My understanding is that it is simply a Mac front-end for BibTex.] Regarding checking out the different families of document classes, I am familiar with Koma and Memoir. There are a few Koma document classes in my LyX installations and only one from Memoir. That surprises me, since I have the full TeX Live package, and my understanding was that it left nothing out. How do I make it available? And are there other families besides these two that I might check out? One last comment, an anxiety I have about tweaking document classes arising from my very limited experience actually using LyX: I have found it difficult to get changes to stick, e.g., using paragraph settings to specify single spacing, left alignment, and no indenting. Thanks again. Sincerely, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Weir Decatur, GA USA [email protected]
