Mail Threads: LyX Users

José Matos

Standard Disclaimer

The tips that are here are only some of all those that appeared in the LyX Users Mailing list. If you have a tip that you think is worth including, please post it to the LyX users' list, with a note, and I will post it in the next edition.

Keep note of Herbert Voß's site, the tips are presented by subject, and the site is updated often with new tips. Thanks Herbert.

Mailing lists activity

According to the mailing lists archive, 737 messages on LyX developers' list and 419 on LyX users' list, December was a busy month.

Figure 1 shows the mailing lists traffic around December 2000. Notice the peak in earlier December due to Matthias Ettrich's message, as reported in the previous LDN. At the other extreme is the Christmas holidays where traffic was almost nil.

Figure 1: Number of messages of the two mailing lists for December 2000.

The top 10 contributers, in December last year, are:

Tips

The tips will return in the next LDN. I have built tools to ease the collection of the notes, especially relating them with the mail archive universal resource locators. The statistics above are one side effect of the effort to turn the information into a more readble format.

Mail Threads: LyX Users

José Matos

Standard Disclaimer

The tips that are here are only some of all those that appeared in the LyX Users Mailing list. If you have a tip that you think is worth including, please post it to the LyX users' list, with a note, and I will post it in the next edition.

Keep note of Herbert Voß's site, the tips are presented by subject, and the site is updated often with new tips. Thanks Herbert.

FAQs of the month

• The file format of lyx has changed between 1.1.5 and 1.1.6. The former version will not understand the new file format. Notice that as usual the new version understands the old format.
• If you have sections of your document that are underlined with blue that means that those sections have a different language from your document's setting.
• Sometimes eps figures imported from Windows have problems due to bad Windows PostScript drivers.
• Allan Rae points that the PowerTools cd that comes with Red Hat 7 has the wrong version of xforms. One typical error is:
  In file included from formula.C:30:
  ../../src/minibuffer.h:17: using directive 'Object' introduced
  ambiguous type '_ObjectRec *'
  make[3]: *** [formula.lo] Error 1
• Check Kayvan's site if you want an rpm for Linux PPC
• An rpm for SuSE (6.4 - also works for 7.0)
• trivia from Lars "I am sure I have said this before, but æøå (ÆØÅ) are the last three letters in the norwegian alphabet. So we don't say from A-Z, but A-Å."

Wish list

Jan Ulrich Hasecke asks for a way to pipe a text region to a shell command.

PDF

• Dekel Tsur posted an updated version of PDF generation with LyX.
• Marcus Beyer shows a tip to get hyperref and pdflatex working together when the "nested link annotations" error appear.
• Adrian Ball gives a PDF output tip.

Fonts

Dekel Tsur says (sorry no link from mail-archive):

Good TTF fonts are available from Microsoft. (Editor's note: these links have been reset to those of the corefonts.sf.net project):

Arial
Times
Courier

They can be extracted using cabextract. See the corefonts.sf.net web page for details.

(note that these TTF fonts will not used by the math editor when displaying greek letters/symbols).

• Jean-Marc Lasgouttes explains the difficulties that surrounds math fonts.
• Tuukka Toivonen contributed to the font discussion, as did Lars. Finally Jean-Pierre Chretien made interesting remarks.

Fax

• Dekel Tsur built a small python script to replace the fax interface that was removed in 1.1.6.
• Dekel also shows how to configure fax and custom ascii export commands for 1.1.6.

FoilTeX

• James Sinnamon started a small thread, 4 messages, about hierarchies of itemized lists in FoilTeX. Worth reading if you use FoilTeX with LyX.
• Dekel Tsur provides a layout file for the seminar package.
• Allan Rae gives more tips to produce presentations with FoilTeX.
• Luc Taesh presents an example to make good looking PDF documents from PostScript.

LyX at work

• Carlos A. M. dos Santos thanks for LyX. One more happy customer. :-)
• Álvaro Tejero Cantero gives a real life example of LyX usage.

Tables

• Jan Goebel started a thread asking how to reduce the font size in tables. Read the followup messages for examples of how to achieve this.
• Rolf von Kuhlmann asks how to place footnotes at the end of a longtable. Herbert and Dekel gives different solutions to the problem.
• Herbert Voß provides a method for tables in g-brief(german) documents.
• Alain Castera presents a method to get colored tables.

Customisation tips

• Dekel Tsur gives one tip to insert a picture on title page.
• Christopher Jones started a thread on how to prevent one line floating onto the next page. This was a short thread because the replies where very precise.
• Herbert Voß gives an example of title page customisation for the report class.
• Herbert Voß shows how to get section and subsection numbers of the document into the header.
• Herbert Voß shows an example of a description based style with a counter. Read the rest of the thread for further variations on the same theme. :-)
• Herbert Voß shows different methods to break page before headers.
• Jean-Marc Lasgouttes shows how to put citation reference into superscript.
• Herbert Voß shows how to enable/disable the printing of comments.
• Alain Castera provides a layout wrapper to the letter class to allow the different elements to come in any order.
• Herbert Voß provides one style to help syllabus writing with LyX.
• Herbert Voß shows how to get left-justified section titles.

LyX Tips

• Guenter Milde shows how to insert thin spaces in LyX.
• Herbert Voß answers to a question on diacritical and cropmarks usage.
• Lars Gullik Bjønnes shows a small program to allow a better import of ascii text.
• Dekel Tsur shows how to reduce space between bibliography entries.
• Dekel Tsur summarises the three methods to insert cross-references when working with multipart documents.

Miscellanea

• Tuukka Toivonen gives a tip how to produce a color (CMYK) separated version of a postscript file.
• Luis Alberto Garcia Cortes points to a site with information regarding philological editing.
• Herbert Voß points the home page of rtf2latex2e.
• James Sinnamon started a thread about suitable vector graphics programs. There are different sugestions on the resulting messages.
• Jan Goebel points out the address to a free software OCR software (gocr). Notice that this project is also on sourceforge. This was one of the solutions to convert documents from PDF for text. One other (commercial) option is pointed out by Herbert Voß.