Re: LyX for bill drafting

[Vincent van Ravesteijn]

Richard Heck schreef:

Dan Fitch wrote:

1. The new hyperref stuff in 1.6 is very slick. Is there any way to
make a "cross reference" to a section or subsection, without adding a
label? So the user might say "As defined in s. 10.91" without having
to go to section 10.91 and adding a label?

  
Not at present, though this functionality has been much discussed. 
I.e., a kind of "auto-label" that exists for certain kinds of 
elements. Come to think of it, work just done by Vincent van 
Ravesteijn might well put this within reach. Vincent, the thought is 
this: Use the context menu in the TOC. I'm sure there are lots of 
issues, though, that I've not yet considered.

Yes, I've thought about this.

You could indeed imagine a context menu item in the TOC "Insert 
reference to section", that will insert a label and a reference at once. 
Or one can think of  a second tab in the cross-reference dialog showing 
all sections too.


Vincent

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[Richard Heck]

Etienne lepercq wrote:




I _really_ think this is a must have: I know someone else that
is willing to work with LyX and propose it to her teacher, but
having to tar/untar ... will make it _very_ difficult to accept.
Of course, you are right about the problem of where to untar
temporary files (as with this approach, I think un-tared files
should be considered as temporary files from the user's point
of view) but currently LyX _does_ use temporary files when
working with an unsaved document !

That's precisely what my old implementation did: untar to the
temporary directory.

I think that preserving the same temporary path is not
decreasing the quality of LyX, and adds a good feature (for
some people, a must have, when compared to the workflow some
have when working with WYSIWYG applications like OOo or MS-Word).

Yes, this model is similar to OOo, etc. Images and the like get
"embedded" within the document and lose touch with where they came
from. But it's a familiar model.


Yes, that's a major drawback ! But the .zlyx could be used as an 
"export" file format to share with others, then one could just merge 
back the .lyx embedded into the .zlyx : I see this as a way one can 
use this feature, but some may want to use it otherwise (as everyone 
does when using OOo for example, reinsert the figure)


This is where things get messy. If you just want an export format, then 
that actually exists already, kind of. There's a script, lyxpak.py, in 
the development tree that will "pack" a LyX file and all its 
dependencies, wherever they may be, into a tar, I think. Then it can be 
shipped off, unpacked, etc. The difficulty is then in "updating". 
Obviously, you can unpack the tar yourself and do with it as you will. 
But, for security reasons, you do not really want LyX to be able 
automatically to unpack and write to arbitrary locations in your 
filesystem.


Richard

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[Richard Heck]

Vincent van Ravesteijn wrote:


On the other hand, I think Vincent was working on this problem a 
while ago. I don't know how far he got.


Actually, I have an implementation of something that allows you to 
export a zipped archive with all figures, bibtex files, child 
documents, etc.etc.



Cool.

rh

Re: LyX for bill drafting

[Charles de Miramon]

Richard Heck wrote:

> Dan Fitch wrote:
>> 1. The new hyperref stuff in 1.6 is very slick. Is there any way to
>> make a "cross reference" to a section or subsection, without adding a
>> label? So the user might say "As defined in s. 10.91" without having
>> to go to section 10.91 and adding a label?
>>
>>   
> Not at present, though this functionality has been much discussed. I.e.,
> a kind of "auto-label" that exists for certain kinds of elements. Come
> to think of it, work just done by Vincent van Ravesteijn might well put
> this within reach. Vincent, the thought is this: Use the context menu in
> the TOC. I'm sure there are lots of issues, though, that I've not yet
> considered.
> 
>> 2. Is there a facility for arbitrary section numbering that integrates
>> with LyX? I have seen ERT solutions that allow forcing a numbering
>> change; is there any way to do that through the LyX UI as of v1.6?
>>
>>   
> No, but it might be possible to do this via modules. I'm not sure.
> 

The tough part would be the (4) (4c) (4e) (4m) (5)

How does it work in your actual software ? Is there any logic in the letters 
?

Cheers,
Charles


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

Re: LyX for bill drafting

[Dan Fitch]

Thanks to the list denizens for being incredibly helpful on this
thread, already, within the space of a single day. You folks rock, and
you obviously have a fierce love of your project!

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Charles de Miramon
 wrote:
> Richard Heck wrote:
>
>> Dan Fitch wrote:
>>> 2. Is there a facility for arbitrary section numbering that integrates
>>> with LyX? I have seen ERT solutions that allow forcing a numbering
>>> change; is there any way to do that through the LyX UI as of v1.6?
>>>
>>>
>> No, but it might be possible to do this via modules. I'm not sure.
>>
>
> The tough part would be the (4) (4c) (4e) (4m) (5)
>
> How does it work in your actual software ? Is there any logic in the letters
> ?
>
> Cheers,
> Charles

It is "ad hoc" so they can always insert sections between two existing
sections; for example, if there is already a 1 and a 2, they can't
renumber those very easily, on account of existing law which may refer
to them. So they make a "1m" to go between. That's only one level of
the structured document; additionally, the cross references can go
across documents. It gets ugly, and it's a very large corpus of text.

As some folks on the lists are pointing out, this kind of arbitrary
section numbering and referencing is a bad idea for many reasons, not
least of which the fact that it clearly causes a huge mess. Of course,
labyrinthine systems have built up over the years to try validate the
user input. They are unmaintainable.

I am basically glorified tech support for this legacy system, so I
can't say "DO IT THIS WAY!" We are hoping to push the users in a saner
direction someday soon, and that may include something like:

- Extending LyX so that the cross reference window has a second tab
with a document structure tree, and if they pick an element from that,
it checks to see if there is a label there; creating it if not

- Reducing their reliance on "implicit" references, where they can say
"See chapter 4, section 5.14 (b)" and have that "automatically" turned
into a cross reference by The Labyrinth

- Convincing them that their current method of referencing is a bit crazy


All this cross reference stuff is one thing; the way bills get amended
is worse, derived directly from how they used to amend things with
typewriters, scissors, and tape by saying "Change line 4 on page 3 to
read XYZ".

It seems initially like LyX is a pretty good fit for this problem area
-- I am curious if anyone else is using it, possibly along with some
of the legal LaTeX/TeX packages like jurabib or lextex.

Thanks again for all your input!

Dan

Re: LyX for bill drafting

[Yury Davidouski]

That has been some interesting insight at the workings of modern  
legislature:)

list of figures

[Niko Schwarz]

Hello!
in my list of figures, the numbers of the figures are standing much too
close to the captions of the figures! what can i do?

niko

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[Christian Ridderström]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009, Richard Heck wrote:


 Yes, that's a major drawback ! But the .zlyx could be used as an
 "export" file format to share with others, then one could just merge
 back the .lyx embedded into the .zlyx : I see this as a way one can
 use this feature, but some may want to use it otherwise (as everyone
 does when using OOo for example, reinsert the figure)

This is where things get messy. If you just want an export format, then that 
actually exists already, kind of. There's a script, lyxpak.py, in the 
development tree that will "pack" a LyX file and all its dependencies, 
wherever they may be, into a tar, I think. Then it can be shipped off, 
unpacked, etc. The difficulty is then in "updating". Obviously, you can 
unpack the tar yourself and do with it as you will. But, for security 
reasons, you do not really want LyX to be able automatically to unpack and 
write to arbitrary locations in your filesystem.


Aren't there options to 'tar' that can help with this, e.g. only allowing 
things to be written to somewhere inside a subdirectory.


As for the "updating", I don't think 'tar' will be enough... you could 
expand the .tar-file into a separate directory and then compare the 
directories and manually move the files that have changed _and_ that you 
want to use to replace your version of those files. Then I thought a bit 
more for a solution, but what I came up with really just ended up 
amounting to a version control system where you were emailing changes.


So why not go for a distributed version control system that supports 
sending changes (or all of it) as e-mail. This way you can get by without 
a server.


/Christian

--
Christian Ridderström   Mobile: +46-70 687 39 44

Re: Lyx install fails in MiKTex install

[Ian S. Worthington]

Uwe, Richard --

Many thanks.

I do need Docbook (I think), but the information of the wiki seems to be
rather out of date and/or confusing.

I'll start another thread for this I think and consolidate my thoughts.

Thanks again.

i

-- Original Message --
Received: 08:50 AM COT, 04/13/2009
From: Richard Heck 
To: "Ian S. Worthington" Cc: Uwe Stöhr
,  lyx-users@lists.lyx.org
Subject: Re: Lyx install fails in MiKTex install

> Ian S. Worthington wrote:
> > Thanks Uwe.
> >
> > That seems to fix the problem with scrbook.layout, but if I create
New>From
> > Template and select docbook_article.lyx, it then fails to find
docbook.layout,
> > even though this again is present in the layouts directory.
> >
> >   
> It's not the layout it fails to find, I wouldn't think, but rather the 
> files for compiling docbook. As Uwe said in a different message, not 
> everything you could possibly use with LyX gets installed with LyX. LyX 
> is a tool that can be used with lots of different things (and more are 
> coming).
> 
> rh
> 
> 

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[Niko Schwarz]

to help sharing files, dropbox is excellent.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Etienne lepercq  wrote:

> I am new to LyX, but not as new to LaTeX : I used Kile for quiet a few time
> now.
> I would like to use LyX to work with several people on an article. As LyX
> is
> much more user-friendly than Kile, a pure LaTeX editor, I convinced my
> collaborators to give a try to LyX.
>
> There is te least one thing in LyX (and LaTeX) that is not easy to handle,
> sharing a whole document to make it modifiable by others : one have to
> build
> an archive with all figures and latex source, collaborators have to untar
> it, open LyX, read/modify/etc... and then... rebuild archive, send the
> archive, etc...
>
> This is counter-productive, not easy to use, it is a pain. One simple
> solution I see for this is to give the ability to LyX to open, say .tar
> archives, with a specific tree inside (.yx sources, then
> figures/allFigures.Whatever or something). Such archive could be called
> .lyxZ files ;-)
>
> Does such feature exist already ? I searched over FAQ/Documentation/Asked
> on
> #LyX but did not find anything more than : two implementations were made
> once, but as nobody could say which was the best... none were released !!
>
> This is not _that_ complex to implement, but is there a way to have such
> feature now, or is there a way to at least release one relatively-good
> implementation ?
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
> Etienne Lepercq
> --
> Sincerily
>

Re: Lyx install fails in MiKTex install

[Uwe Stöhr]

Ian S. Worthington schrieb:


I do need Docbook (I think), but the information of the wiki seems to be
rather out of date and/or confusing.
I don't know anything about DocBook and therefroe ask you to improve the Wiki pages when you found 
out how it works.


thanks and regards
Uwe

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[Murat Yildizoglu]

Just my two cents: Scientific Word was used to come with a utility
called Document Manager. It was able to pack everything in a .msg
file. The utility has a GUI that gives you options for choosing the
elements to include for the packing and other options during
unpacking.  I think that we were even allowed to distribute it to the
collaborators with whom we share files. I do not know if such a
solution would be sufficient and enough secure... Also, it worked only
for Windows, we would definitely need a cross-platform tool for LyX of
course. But, such a tool would definitely be useful.

Regards,

Murat

2009/4/13 Niko Schwarz :
> to help sharing files, dropbox is excellent.
>
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Etienne lepercq  wrote:
>
>> I am new to LyX, but not as new to LaTeX : I used Kile for quiet a few time
>> now.
>> I would like to use LyX to work with several people on an article. As LyX
>> is
>> much more user-friendly than Kile, a pure LaTeX editor, I convinced my
>> collaborators to give a try to LyX.
>>
>> There is te least one thing in LyX (and LaTeX) that is not easy to handle,
>> sharing a whole document to make it modifiable by others : one have to
>> build
>> an archive with all figures and latex source, collaborators have to untar
>> it, open LyX, read/modify/etc... and then... rebuild archive, send the
>> archive, etc...
>>
>> This is counter-productive, not easy to use, it is a pain. One simple
>> solution I see for this is to give the ability to LyX to open, say .tar
>> archives, with a specific tree inside (.yx sources, then
>> figures/allFigures.Whatever or something). Such archive could be called
>> .lyxZ files ;-)
>>
>> Does such feature exist already ? I searched over FAQ/Documentation/Asked
>> on
>> #LyX but did not find anything more than : two implementations were made
>> once, but as nobody could say which was the best... none were released !!
>>
>> This is not _that_ complex to implement, but is there a way to have such
>> feature now, or is there a way to at least release one relatively-good
>> implementation ?
>>
>> Thanks a lot.
>>
>> Etienne Lepercq
>> --
>> Sincerily
>>
>



-- 
*** NEW UNIVERSITY, NEW ADDRESS ! ***

Prof. Murat Yildizoglu
Université Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseille 3)
GREQAM (UMR CNRS 6579)
Centre de la Vieille Charité
2, rue de la Charité
13236 Marseille cedex 02

Bureau 320
Tel : +33 4 91 14 07 27 (standard)
Tel : +33 4 91 14 07 70 (secrétariat)
Tel : +33 4 91 14 07 47 (bureau)
Fax : +33 4 91 90 02 27

e-mail: murat.yildizo...@univ-cezanne.fr
www : http://www.vcharite.univ-mrs.fr/PP/yildi/index.html
http://www.twitter.com/yildizoglu
__

Re: list of figures

[Uwe Stöhr]

Niko Schwarz schrieb:


in my list of figures, the numbers of the figures are standing much too
close to the captions of the figures! what can i do?


Add this command to your document preamble:

\newcommand...@figure{\@dottedtocline{1}{1.5em}{2.3em}}

(http://texnik.dante.de/cgi-bin/mainFAQ.cgi?file=tocloft/TOC#label)

regards Uwe

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[rgheck]

Christian Ridderström wrote:

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009, Richard Heck wrote:


 Yes, that's a major drawback ! But the .zlyx could be used as an
 "export" file format to share with others, then one could just merge
 back the .lyx embedded into the .zlyx : I see this as a way one can
 use this feature, but some may want to use it otherwise (as everyone
 does when using OOo for example, reinsert the figure)

This is where things get messy. If you just want an export format, 
then that actually exists already, kind of. There's a script, 
lyxpak.py, in the development tree that will "pack" a LyX file and 
all its dependencies, wherever they may be, into a tar, I think. Then 
it can be shipped off, unpacked, etc. The difficulty is then in 
"updating". Obviously, you can unpack the tar yourself and do with it 
as you will. But, for security reasons, you do not really want LyX to 
be able automatically to unpack and write to arbitrary locations in 
your filesystem.


Aren't there options to 'tar' that can help with this, e.g. only 
allowing things to be written to somewhere inside a subdirectory.


Yes, of course, and if you're not worried about updating, then that is 
sufficient.


rh

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[rgheck]

Murat Yildizoglu wrote:

Just my two cents: Scientific Word was used to come with a utility
called Document Manager. It was able to pack everything in a .msg
file. The utility has a GUI that gives you options for choosing the
elements to include for the packing and other options during
unpacking.  I think that we were even allowed to distribute it to the
collaborators with whom we share files. I do not know if such a
solution would be sufficient and enough secure... Also, it worked only
for Windows, we would definitely need a cross-platform tool for LyX of
course. But, such a tool would definitely be useful.

  
I'll second what a few others have said: A version control system is 
really the way to go for collaboration. You get easy exchanges, easy 
updating, conflict management, plus you get versioned archving of 
everything you do. There are plenty of free hosting services for this 
kind of thing, if you don't already have access to some server or other.


Richard

Lyx and DocBook

[Ian S. Worthington]

I'm trying to find a content markup system (authoring and processing) that can
output to various formats. Something which can be both viewed and printed,
such as PDF, is probably a must, and something easily accessed online, such as
HTML is close behind.  If I could also produce CHM (or similar) Windows help
files that would be nice too.

I come from a IBM BookMaster background so I'm comfortable with content
markup, and don't really need an authoring tool to work with it.  DocBook
seems to fit most of my needs but the markup syntax is user-hostile.  The
DocBook wiki points to a number of authoring tools, most of which are just
generic XML editors.  The only DocBook-specific tool there verges on the
unusable.  It also lists Lyx which seems a mature and usable tool for Latex,
and produces highly attractive PDF documents.  I read though that getting
attractive HTML out of it is difficult.

If I understand correctly I have to choose a target language for Lyx from the
start:  I can't start off with Latex and then later decide to I want to target
DocBook, for example.

So having got Lyx installed I'm looking in more detail at DocBook.  A lot of
the information seems to be out of date.  There's a Lyx-to-X project that only
works up to v1.2.0 of Lyx, and some old discussions on various sites of
needing sgmltools, sgmltools-lite, or maybe sgmltools2, which appear to have
been abandoned some years ago.

This mailing lists contains occasional requests for help, but not too much
information.  If it wasn't for the information at
http://www.neomantic.com/tutorials/lyx-and-docbookXML I would have concluded
that DocBook support in Lyx had been effectively abandoned.

I wonder then if someone could help me with the following:
 
1. Am I right in my thinking that if I want good quality HTML and potentially
CHM output, as well as PDF, then DocBook is the way to go rather than Latex?

2. And that if I want DocBook, then I need to be using that from the start?

3. Is DocBook development in Lyx abandonded or is it just quiet for the
moment?

4. Is there any documentation on what a user of the latest version of Lyx has
to do to resolve the "unavailable class" messages when using DocBook, and what
they need to install in 2009 to get output from it.

Thanks,

i

Re: Lyx and DocBook

[Richard Talley]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Ian S. Worthington
 wrote:
>
> It also lists Lyx which seems a mature and usable tool for Latex,
> and produces highly attractive PDF documents.  I read though that getting
> attractive HTML out of it is difficult.
>

I''m getting good results out of the new tool ELyXer.

http://wiki.lyx.org/Tools/ELyXer

There have been a couple of threads about ELyXer on this mailing list.
It's new and has some limitations. For instance, no TOC generation
yet.

However, the tool's author, Alex Fernandez, really likes getting
challenging documents and making ELyXer work with them.

-- Rich

Re: [Figure embedding] An easy way to share lyx documents

[Etienne lepercq]

2009/4/13, Niko Schwarz :
>
> to help sharing files, dropbox is excellent.
>
> Hmm interesting idea : I'll try, even if it imply using a third-party tool.
I'll give it a try.

-- 
Sincerily

Re: Lyx and DocBook

[rgheck]

Ian S. Worthington wrote:

If I understand correctly I have to choose a target language for Lyx from the
start:  I can't start off with Latex and then later decide to I want to target
DocBook, for example.

  
No, you can switch the documents. There may be some issues about how 
different bits of formatting get converted that will make things easier 
or more difficult. But these can often be resolved using an external 
script of some sort (sed, awk, perl, etc).



This mailing lists contains occasional requests for help, but not too much
information.  If it wasn't for the information at
http://www.neomantic.com/tutorials/lyx-and-docbookXML I would have concluded
that DocBook support in Lyx had been effectively abandoned.

  
No, it still exists. Not many people use it, though, so how current it 
is, etc, is unclear. That said, however, there are some developers who 
pay attention to DocBook, and I think it's intended that it be usable.



I wonder then if someone could help me with the following:
 
1. Am I right in my thinking that if I want good quality HTML and potentially

CHM output, as well as PDF, then DocBook is the way to go rather than Latex?

  
Possibly, though there are a lot of options for HTML now. You might 
check out plastex, which looks to me to be the most promising.



2. And that if I want DocBook, then I need to be using that from the start?

  

Not necessarily. See above.


3. Is DocBook development in Lyx abandonded or is it just quiet for the moment?

  
See above again. Though perhaps it's worth my saying what "DocBook 
development" is. There are just two aspects to it: (i) The DocBook 
layouts; (ii) the DocBook output routines. Both of these could be worked 
on by newbies, to some extent, certainly the layouts and very probably 
the output routines.



4. Is there any documentation on what a user of the latest version of Lyx has
to do to resolve the "unavailable class" messages when using DocBook, and what
they need to install in 2009 to get output from it.

  
I'm not sure. But looking at configure.py, it seems that you need 
sgmltools installed, or else db2dvi or db2html.


I'm cc'ing Martin Vermeer, as I think he knows about this

Richard



Thanks,

i






  

Re: list of figures

[Niko Schwarz]

hmm. then i get this error message:

@figur...@dottedtocline{1}{1.5em}{2.3em}}

 Your command was ignored.

Type I   to replace it with another command,

or  to continue without it.


niko

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Uwe Stöhr  wrote:

> Niko Schwarz schrieb:
>
>  in my list of figures, the numbers of the figures are standing much too
>> close to the captions of the figures! what can i do?
>>
>
> Add this command to your document preamble:
>
> \newcommand...@figure{\@dottedtocline{1}{1.5em}{2.3em}}
>
> (http://texnik.dante.de/cgi-bin/mainFAQ.cgi?file=tocloft/TOC#label)
>
> regards Uwe
>