On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:28:30 -0600 stefano franchi <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Uwe Stöhr <[email protected]> wrote: > > Am 12.02.2012 14:53, schrieb Colin Williams: > > To start writing a book I suggest to start with LyX's thesis > > template files. You find them in LyX's installation folder under > > \Resources\templates\thesis. > > Another option (and one I recently used) for writing books with Lyx is > to use the memoir class. It is probably the most flexible class ever > produced for LateX and it allows tweaking of most, if not all, aspects > of a publications. It also has a comprehensive, very well written > manual (a book, really). It will require you to learn some LaTeX, > though. Memoir is cool, but be very careful, because Memoir screws up with certain other packages, most notably hyperref, for which you'll need the memhfixc package, and a lot of rain dances to get it to work. Or at least that's how I remember it. My thought is if you use Memoir, use it every time so you get to know Memoir like the back of your hand, and you can fix hyperref problems in minutes instead of days. > > Let me add one comment to the great response from Steve: I don't think > you can become a fast writer in Lyx (as Steve says) unless you get at > least an idea of how Latex works and thinks. You need to learn a bit > about environments (paragraph styles), how fonts are used in LaTeX, > about the various components of a page, about compilation, etcetera. > Lyx does a marvelous job at hiding most of the complexity of Latex, > but when push comes to show and things go wrong (i.e. the file does > not compile, your output does not look th way it should, etcetera), > knowing a bit of the language Lyx uses to produce output becomes > precious. If, and when, you decide to start using Lyx, I would buy a > copy of The Latex Companion [1] and start reading at least the first > few chapters. IIRC I bought both The Latex Companion and Guide to LaTeX and downloaded the Memoir doc class documentation and read it all, because yeah, if you ever want to create or change a style, you're going to need a good knowledge of LaTeX. Stefano makes an excellent point that lack of LaTeX knowledge slows you down, as it does for me to this day, 11 years after I came to LyX. One way I like to minimize the slowing is, when I create a new style, do a minimal job of it so it's recognizable as a different style on both output and the LyX environment. So I take 5 or 10 minutes to make the style and then start pounding out content again. Then, every once in a while, I take a technical day and make the styles look how I want them to look. Thanks SteveT
