RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

1) I love Lyx
2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
nice to keep focused on the contents.
3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
this kind.

Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
and win! :)

Greetings everyone,

Luca D.M.

http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
http://www.opengeu.com

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Michael Joyner ᏩᏯ]

Luca De Marini wrote:
 Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
 in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
 LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
 and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
 of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
 Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
 studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
 An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
 white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
 going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
 of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
 tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
 possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
 background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
 or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
 kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
   
There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with a
little bit of ERT.

 Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
 small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
 small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
 but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
 or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
 document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

 Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

 1) I love Lyx
 2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
 Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
 nice to keep focused on the contents.
 3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
 I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
 in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
 4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
 GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
 inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
 you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
 powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
 this kind.

 Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
 is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
 incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
 this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
 for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
 and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
 and win! :)

 Greetings everyone,

 Luca D.M.

 http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
 http://www.opengeu.com

   


-- 
LyX: http://www.lyx.org/ OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/
Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/ Scribus: http://www.scribus.net/
GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/ PDF: http://www.pdfforge.org/




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

 2009/7/13 Michael Joyner ᏩᏯ mjoy...@vbservices.net
 
 There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with a
 little bit of ERT.


Thank you very much for your suggestion. Of course I can use it but the
question is: isn't it better to integrate it in Lyx so that people can use
wallpapers normally? In any case, I'll do it with ERT for now.

2009/7/13 Charles de Miramon cmira...@kde-france.org

 Luca De Marini wrote:

  Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new
  adventure in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only
 fronted-side,
  not code or LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual
  here in Italy and my idea is that of trying to write it with an
 opensource
  software. Now, of course I know that for typography the best tool is
  Scribus. BUT, I love Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful
  thesis for my Architectural studies with it.

 I don't know how you want to design your RPG manual. But if you have
 complex
 and very graphically oriented pages, scribus is a better tool.


Sure Charles, as I said, it is very graphically rich. Look at WhiteWolf's
kind of manual for an example, it costs you nothing, just visit the site or
have a screen of some pages in google! Vampire, Wherewolf, the style's that.

And as I said, of course I know Scribus is a better toy for this kind of
work. The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a manual
such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)
Greets,

Luca

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Manveru]

2009/7/13 Luca De Marini luca.darkmas...@gmail.com:
 Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
 in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
 LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
 and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
 of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
 Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
 studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
 An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
 white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
 going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
 of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
 tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
 possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
 background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
 or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
 kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
 Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
 small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
 small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
 but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
 or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
 document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

 Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

 1) I love Lyx
 2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
 Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
 nice to keep focused on the contents.
 3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
 I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
 in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
 4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
 GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
 inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
 you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
 powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
 this kind.

 Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
 is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
 incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
 this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
 for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
 and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
 and win! :)

 Greetings everyone,

 Luca D.M.

 http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
 http://www.opengeu.com


You know... My answer to above is that you have to learn TeX and LaTeX
hard, and then design your own style for that with all fountains. Then
you have to prepare layout file for LyX. The example of Beamer shows
that LaTeX allows a lot, really.

If you choose Scribus (which is very professional open-source piece of
DTP software), please keep on mind the designers way of preparing such
documents. You have to write all your text content and prepare all the
graphics at first stage, then at the next step design your styles in
Scribus and then use the elements from both stages to design your
manual. If you start in Scribus and you will experiment with this, you
quickly do a real mess in you design and then you may need to start
from scratch with it.


-- 
Manveru
jabber: manv...@manveru.pl
 gg: 1624001
   http://www.manveru.pl

RE: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Vincent van Ravesteijn - TNW]

 
 There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with

 a little bit of ERT.


Thank you very much for your suggestion. Of course I
can use it but the question is: isn't it better to
integrate it in Lyx so that people can use wallpapers
normally? In any case, I'll do it with ERT for now.

We have an option to specify the page background color now, why not
adding a wallpaper option indeed ? I'll propose this to the other
developers. Let's see what happens ;-).

 I don't know how you want to design your RPG manual. But if you have 
 complex and very graphically oriented pages, scribus is a better tool.


I don't know scribus, but maybe it's a powerful combination to be able
to use scribus for the graphics part of your document and use LyX for
the text.

The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a 
manual such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)

It's nice to push LyX to the limit. I can think of a special editor in
LyX to design header-styles, chapter-styles etc. etc., but it will take
some time before this can be done within LyX. For now, one has to code
LaTeX.


I'm very open to hear good ideas, .. 

Greets,

Luca

Vincent

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[William Adams]

Luca De Marini wrote:


An RPG manual is something way more elaborated.



Well, that depends on the manual.

FWIW, Columbia Games used to produce all of their books using TeX ---  
they had very high production values even using lovely textured stock  
and sepia coloured ink (until someone whined and they quit doing so).


William

--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

2009/7/13 William Adams will.ad...@frycomm.com

 Luca De Marini wrote:

  An RPG manual is something way more elaborated.



 Well, that depends on the manual.

 FWIW, Columbia Games used to produce all of their books using TeX --- they
 had very high production values even using lovely textured stock and sepia
 coloured ink (until someone whined and they quit doing so).


Ok then, let's say many modern RPGs nowadays :)
Greets,

Luca

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Charles de Miramon]

Luca De Marini wrote:


 And as I said, of course I know Scribus is a better toy for this kind of
 work. The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
 can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a
 manual such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)
 Greets,


I had a look at the gory, satanic stuff ;-)

The problem with LaTeX and LyX is the positioning of images. You cannot 
position absolutely an image on a page in LaTeX. You don't have also the 
concept of layers. If you are a LaTeX expert, they are tricks, for example 
with tikz but you are going to suffer and too many LaTeX compilation errors 
will make you curse and turn you in a soulless ghoul.

Cheers,
Charles 


-- 
http://www.kde-france.org

RE: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Vincent van Ravesteijn - TNW]

   I'm very open to hear good ideas, ..
 
  Very nice to know :)
 
 What maybe someone is misunderstanding is I'm not asking for help 
 on how to create an RPG manual, I created some of them already 
 with Scribus and the result is more than interesting. 
 
Good, otherwise I'd have said not to use LyX :).
 
 When you have a goal to reach things can be seen in a much clearer
way. 
 If you are interested I can write down some sketches of what is needed

 when someone is designing this kind of document, with already created 
 examples, and what could be implemented in Lyx to achieve that goal. 
 So that we could analyze everything step by step and see if there's a
way 
 to implement this or that feature from Latex to Lyx.  
 
The easiest would be to write a module of such a feature. This doesn't
need any adjustments to LyX and you can share it with others. 


 If we go trough this adventure I'm sure at the end Lyx's gonna have
much 
 more potential than now with not so many added features! I mean,
surely 
 we can optimize the needed features for this kind of work. A single
new 
 thing can be used to achieve many different results. 
 
I just want to warn you that maybe not everything you want is easy to
accomplish. You can easily be frustrated by all LaTeX code that is
needed. Besides, there are infinite number of features to be added to
LyX, but there won't be support from developers for all. If you can
really indicate a few features that would be useful for a larger
community which do not deviate too much from LyX's philosophy, we
might end up with a better LyX.
 
 
Vincent 

RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

1) I love Lyx
2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
nice to keep focused on the contents.
3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
this kind.

Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
and win! :)

Greetings everyone,

Luca D.M.

http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
http://www.opengeu.com

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Michael Joyner ᏩᏯ]

Luca De Marini wrote:
 Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
 in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
 LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
 and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
 of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
 Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
 studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
 An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
 white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
 going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
 of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
 tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
 possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
 background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
 or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
 kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
   
There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with a
little bit of ERT.

 Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
 small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
 small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
 but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
 or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
 document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

 Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

 1) I love Lyx
 2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
 Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
 nice to keep focused on the contents.
 3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
 I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
 in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
 4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
 GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
 inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
 you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
 powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
 this kind.

 Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
 is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
 incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
 this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
 for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
 and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
 and win! :)

 Greetings everyone,

 Luca D.M.

 http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
 http://www.opengeu.com

   


-- 
LyX: http://www.lyx.org/ OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/
Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/ Scribus: http://www.scribus.net/
GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/ PDF: http://www.pdfforge.org/




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

 2009/7/13 Michael Joyner ᏩᏯ mjoy...@vbservices.net
 
 There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with a
 little bit of ERT.


Thank you very much for your suggestion. Of course I can use it but the
question is: isn't it better to integrate it in Lyx so that people can use
wallpapers normally? In any case, I'll do it with ERT for now.

2009/7/13 Charles de Miramon cmira...@kde-france.org

 Luca De Marini wrote:

  Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new
  adventure in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only
 fronted-side,
  not code or LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual
  here in Italy and my idea is that of trying to write it with an
 opensource
  software. Now, of course I know that for typography the best tool is
  Scribus. BUT, I love Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful
  thesis for my Architectural studies with it.

 I don't know how you want to design your RPG manual. But if you have
 complex
 and very graphically oriented pages, scribus is a better tool.


Sure Charles, as I said, it is very graphically rich. Look at WhiteWolf's
kind of manual for an example, it costs you nothing, just visit the site or
have a screen of some pages in google! Vampire, Wherewolf, the style's that.

And as I said, of course I know Scribus is a better toy for this kind of
work. The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a manual
such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)
Greets,

Luca

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Manveru]

2009/7/13 Luca De Marini luca.darkmas...@gmail.com:
 Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
 in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
 LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
 and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
 of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
 Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
 studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
 An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
 white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
 going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
 of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
 tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
 possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
 background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
 or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
 kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
 Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
 small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
 small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
 but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
 or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
 document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

 Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

 1) I love Lyx
 2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
 Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
 nice to keep focused on the contents.
 3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
 I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
 in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
 4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
 GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
 inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
 you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
 powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
 this kind.

 Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
 is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
 incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
 this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
 for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
 and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
 and win! :)

 Greetings everyone,

 Luca D.M.

 http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
 http://www.opengeu.com


You know... My answer to above is that you have to learn TeX and LaTeX
hard, and then design your own style for that with all fountains. Then
you have to prepare layout file for LyX. The example of Beamer shows
that LaTeX allows a lot, really.

If you choose Scribus (which is very professional open-source piece of
DTP software), please keep on mind the designers way of preparing such
documents. You have to write all your text content and prepare all the
graphics at first stage, then at the next step design your styles in
Scribus and then use the elements from both stages to design your
manual. If you start in Scribus and you will experiment with this, you
quickly do a real mess in you design and then you may need to start
from scratch with it.


-- 
Manveru
jabber: manv...@manveru.pl
 gg: 1624001
   http://www.manveru.pl

RE: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Vincent van Ravesteijn - TNW]

 
 There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with

 a little bit of ERT.


Thank you very much for your suggestion. Of course I
can use it but the question is: isn't it better to
integrate it in Lyx so that people can use wallpapers
normally? In any case, I'll do it with ERT for now.

We have an option to specify the page background color now, why not
adding a wallpaper option indeed ? I'll propose this to the other
developers. Let's see what happens ;-).

 I don't know how you want to design your RPG manual. But if you have 
 complex and very graphically oriented pages, scribus is a better tool.


I don't know scribus, but maybe it's a powerful combination to be able
to use scribus for the graphics part of your document and use LyX for
the text.

The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a 
manual such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)

It's nice to push LyX to the limit. I can think of a special editor in
LyX to design header-styles, chapter-styles etc. etc., but it will take
some time before this can be done within LyX. For now, one has to code
LaTeX.


I'm very open to hear good ideas, .. 

Greets,

Luca

Vincent

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[William Adams]

Luca De Marini wrote:


An RPG manual is something way more elaborated.



Well, that depends on the manual.

FWIW, Columbia Games used to produce all of their books using TeX ---  
they had very high production values even using lovely textured stock  
and sepia coloured ink (until someone whined and they quit doing so).


William

--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

2009/7/13 William Adams will.ad...@frycomm.com

 Luca De Marini wrote:

  An RPG manual is something way more elaborated.



 Well, that depends on the manual.

 FWIW, Columbia Games used to produce all of their books using TeX --- they
 had very high production values even using lovely textured stock and sepia
 coloured ink (until someone whined and they quit doing so).


Ok then, let's say many modern RPGs nowadays :)
Greets,

Luca

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Charles de Miramon]

Luca De Marini wrote:


 And as I said, of course I know Scribus is a better toy for this kind of
 work. The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
 can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a
 manual such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)
 Greets,


I had a look at the gory, satanic stuff ;-)

The problem with LaTeX and LyX is the positioning of images. You cannot 
position absolutely an image on a page in LaTeX. You don't have also the 
concept of layers. If you are a LaTeX expert, they are tricks, for example 
with tikz but you are going to suffer and too many LaTeX compilation errors 
will make you curse and turn you in a soulless ghoul.

Cheers,
Charles 


-- 
http://www.kde-france.org

RE: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Vincent van Ravesteijn - TNW]

   I'm very open to hear good ideas, ..
 
  Very nice to know :)
 
 What maybe someone is misunderstanding is I'm not asking for help 
 on how to create an RPG manual, I created some of them already 
 with Scribus and the result is more than interesting. 
 
Good, otherwise I'd have said not to use LyX :).
 
 When you have a goal to reach things can be seen in a much clearer
way. 
 If you are interested I can write down some sketches of what is needed

 when someone is designing this kind of document, with already created 
 examples, and what could be implemented in Lyx to achieve that goal. 
 So that we could analyze everything step by step and see if there's a
way 
 to implement this or that feature from Latex to Lyx.  
 
The easiest would be to write a module of such a feature. This doesn't
need any adjustments to LyX and you can share it with others. 


 If we go trough this adventure I'm sure at the end Lyx's gonna have
much 
 more potential than now with not so many added features! I mean,
surely 
 we can optimize the needed features for this kind of work. A single
new 
 thing can be used to achieve many different results. 
 
I just want to warn you that maybe not everything you want is easy to
accomplish. You can easily be frustrated by all LaTeX code that is
needed. Besides, there are infinite number of features to be added to
LyX, but there won't be support from developers for all. If you can
really indicate a few features that would be useful for a larger
community which do not deviate too much from LyX's philosophy, we
might end up with a better LyX.
 
 
Vincent 

RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).

Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:

1) I love Lyx
2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
nice to keep focused on the contents.
3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
this kind.

Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
and win! :)

Greetings everyone,

Luca D.M.

http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
http://www.opengeu.com

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Michael Joyner ᏩᏯ]

Luca De Marini wrote:
> Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
> in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
> LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
> and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
> of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
> Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
> studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
> An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
> white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
> going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
> of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
> tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
> possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
> background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
> or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
> kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
>   
There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with a
little bit of ERT.

> Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
> small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
> small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
> but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
> or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
> document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).
>
> Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:
>
> 1) I love Lyx
> 2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
> Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
> nice to keep focused on the contents.
> 3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
> I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
> in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
> 4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
> GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
> inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
> you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
> powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
> this kind.
>
> Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
> is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
> incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
> this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
> for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
> and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
> and win! :)
>
> Greetings everyone,
>
> Luca D.M.
>
> http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
> http://www.opengeu.com
>
>   


-- 
LyX: http://www.lyx.org/ OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/
Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/ Scribus: http://www.scribus.net/
GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/ PDF: http://www.pdfforge.org/




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

>
> 2009/7/13 Michael Joyner ᏩᏯ 
> >
> There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with a
> little bit of ERT.


Thank you very much for your suggestion. Of course I can use it but the
question is: isn't it better to integrate it in Lyx so that people can use
wallpapers normally? In any case, I'll do it with ERT for now.

2009/7/13 Charles de Miramon 

> Luca De Marini wrote:
>
> > Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new
> > adventure in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only
> fronted-side,
> > not code or LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual
> > here in Italy and my idea is that of trying to write it with an
> opensource
> > software. Now, of course I know that for typography the best tool is
> > Scribus. BUT, I love Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful
> > thesis for my Architectural studies with it.
>
> I don't know how you want to design your RPG manual. But if you have
> complex
> and very graphically oriented pages, scribus is a better tool.
>

Sure Charles, as I said, it is very graphically rich. Look at WhiteWolf's
kind of manual for an example, it costs you nothing, just visit the site or
have a screen of some pages in google! Vampire, Wherewolf, the style's that.

And as I said, of course I know Scribus is a better toy for this kind of
work. The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a manual
such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)
Greets,

Luca

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Manveru]

2009/7/13 Luca De Marini :
> Hallo everybody, I'm writing this because I'd like to start a new adventure
> in lyx now that I know a lot about this tool, only fronted-side, not code or
> LaTex side, sorry. So, I'm writing a Role Playing game manual here in Italy
> and my idea is that of trying to write it with an opensource software. Now,
> of course I know that for typography the best tool is Scribus. BUT, I love
> Lyx and I managed to create a fantastic colorful thesis for my Architectural
> studies with it. It was a 2 columns document with notes, pictures, etc.
> An RPG manual is something way more elaborated. WAY MORE. Have a look at
> white wolf's manuals to understand the extent of the graphical effort I'm
> going to achieve. The problem is, many things cannot be done, from my point
> of view, in Lyx to achieve this result. And maybe this is simply not the
> tool intended for this kind of result. I need 2 columns pages (OK) with the
> possibility to use a picture as a frame for the entire page, or as a
> background if you prefer. This picture should be changeable from a section
> or from a chapter to another. Say, this chapter has a picture frame of one
> kind, then changng chapter I can change the background picture again, etc.
> Not only that. I need to be able to put parts of a text, like a citation, a
> small emphasized part of the text, something to be outlined, into a fancy
> small picture used as a background for it. Fancy tables would be needed too,
> but this could even be used with a work-around: I create the tables in Gimp
> or something similar, save them as picture and import them into the Lyx
> document in a Floating Table frame (for table indexing later).
>
> Now, why I wanna do it in Lyx? Many reasons, the main reasons are:
>
> 1) I love Lyx
> 2) Lyx documents look incredible, very nice, very professional.
> Everything is automated and done for good, it is NOT a WYSIWYG and this is
> nice to keep focused on the contents.
> 3) I'm an opensource fan and leader of a GNU / LInux distro (OPenGEU) and
> I'd like to show off to the world the powers of opensource software. Lyx is
> in my opinion the best thing around in opensource documents managing.
> 4) Currently all of this is impossible to do in Lyx with normal tools and
> GUI commands. Probably the result is achievable with complex code to be
> inserted here and there. This is NOT the solution. People cannot use code,
> you can't ask people to. So, probably this effort will help Lyx become more
> powerful, many new small adjustements could be implemented with a work of
> this kind.
>
> Everybody, coders, users, everyone is invited in participating. I think this
> is a great occasion to have a powerfuller Lyx, able of achieving even more
> incredible results in many more fields of documents processing. Do you think
> this is achievable? Anyone wanna help? Remember I'm not trying to do this
> for my only personal achievement. It costs zero to me using Scribus instead
> and living Lyx alone. It's just that I think this can be a nice fight to try
> and win! :)
>
> Greetings everyone,
>
> Luca D.M.
>
> http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com
> http://www.opengeu.com
>

You know... My answer to above is that you have to learn TeX and LaTeX
hard, and then design your own style for that with all fountains. Then
you have to prepare layout file for LyX. The example of Beamer shows
that LaTeX allows a lot, really.

If you choose Scribus (which is very professional open-source piece of
DTP software), please keep on mind the designers way of preparing such
documents. You have to write all your text content and prepare all the
graphics at first stage, then at the next step design your styles in
Scribus and then use the elements from both stages to design your
manual. If you start in Scribus and you will experiment with this, you
quickly do a real mess in you design and then you may need to start
from scratch with it.


-- 
Manveru
jabber: manv...@manveru.pl
 gg: 1624001
   http://www.manveru.pl

RE: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Vincent van Ravesteijn - TNW]

>> >
>> There is a package called 'wallpaper' that may do this very well with

>> a little bit of ERT.
>
>
>Thank you very much for your suggestion. Of course I
>can use it but the question is: isn't it better to
>integrate it in Lyx so that people can use wallpapers
>normally? In any case, I'll do it with ERT for now.

We have an option to specify the page background color now, why not
adding a wallpaper option indeed ? I'll propose this to the other
developers. Let's see what happens ;-).

> I don't know how you want to design your RPG manual. But if you have 
> complex and very graphically oriented pages, scribus is a better tool.
>

I don't know scribus, but maybe it's a powerful combination to be able
to use scribus for the graphics part of your document and use LyX for
the text.

>The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
>can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a 
>manual such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)

It's nice to push LyX to the limit. I can think of a special editor in
LyX to design header-styles, chapter-styles etc. etc., but it will take
some time before this can be done within LyX. For now, one has to code
LaTeX.


I'm very open to hear good ideas, .. 

>Greets,
>
>Luca

Vincent

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[William Adams]

Luca De Marini wrote:


An RPG manual is something way more elaborated.



Well, that depends on the manual.

FWIW, Columbia Games used to produce all of their books using TeX ---  
they had very high production values even using lovely textured stock  
and sepia coloured ink (until someone whined and they quit doing so).


William

--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Luca De Marini]

2009/7/13 William Adams 

> Luca De Marini wrote:
>
>  An RPG manual is something way more elaborated.
>>
>
>
> Well, that depends on the manual.
>
> FWIW, Columbia Games used to produce all of their books using TeX --- they
> had very high production values even using lovely textured stock and sepia
> coloured ink (until someone whined and they quit doing so).
>
>
Ok then, let's say many modern RPGs nowadays :)
Greets,

Luca

Re: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Charles de Miramon]

Luca De Marini wrote:


> And as I said, of course I know Scribus is a better toy for this kind of
> work. The interesting thing for me is pushing Lyx to the limit, see if it
> can do this work, see if it will make the whole process of writing a
> manual such a pain that using Scribus would be better instead :)
> Greets,


I had a look at the gory, satanic stuff ;-)

The problem with LaTeX and LyX is the positioning of images. You cannot 
position absolutely an image on a page in LaTeX. You don't have also the 
concept of layers. If you are a LaTeX expert, they are tricks, for example 
with tikz but you are going to suffer and too many LaTeX compilation errors 
will make you curse and turn you in a soulless ghoul.

Cheers,
Charles 


-- 
http://www.kde-france.org

RE: RPG Manual with Lyx?

[Vincent van Ravesteijn - TNW]

> >  I'm very open to hear good ideas, ..
> 
>  Very nice to know :)
> 
> What maybe someone is misunderstanding is I'm not asking for help 
> on how to create an RPG manual, I created some of them already 
> with Scribus and the result is more than interesting. 
 
Good, otherwise I'd have said not to use LyX :).
 
> When you have a goal to reach things can be seen in a much clearer
way. 
> If you are interested I can write down some sketches of what is needed

> when someone is designing this kind of document, with already created 
> examples, and what could be implemented in Lyx to achieve that goal. 
> So that we could analyze everything step by step and see if there's a
way 
> to implement this or that feature from Latex to Lyx.  
 
The easiest would be to write a module of such a feature. This doesn't
need any adjustments to LyX and you can share it with others. 


> If we go trough this adventure I'm sure at the end Lyx's gonna have
much 
> more potential than now with not so many added features! I mean,
surely 
> we can optimize the needed features for this kind of work. A single
new 
> thing can be used to achieve many different results. 
 
I just want to warn you that maybe not everything you want is easy to
accomplish. You can easily be frustrated by all LaTeX code that is
needed. Besides, there are infinite number of features to be added to
LyX, but there won't be support from developers for all. If you can
really indicate a few features that would be useful for a larger
community which do not deviate too much from "LyX's philosophy", we
might end up with a better LyX.
 
 
Vincent