Yaneric Roussel wrote:
> Is there an easy methods to customize what will be the final
> aspect of the document? Do you have some pointeurs (URL) to
> help me?
I hope I'm not answering the wrong question...
I have done some work at setting up custom layouts, but unfortunately I've
never had time to document any of it. And it does require substantial LaTeX
knowledge, but once you've set up a layout it becomes trivially easy to use
and you don't have to embed a lot of LaTeX in your LyX documents anymore.
The essence of the customization is to identify a LyX layout that is close to
what you want, clone its .layout file to give it a new name, and start
hacking on the clone to suit your purposes.
The layout files are in <prefix-dir>/lyx/layouts. Use
locate /lyx/layouts
to find out what your prefix-dir is.
After you create your clone you will need to run <prefix-dir>/lyx/configure
(possibly as root) to update <prefix-dir>/lyx/textclass.lst, so that the new
layout will become visible to LyX. You only need to customize your first
line of the layout before you do this reconfiguration; after that I believe
you can modify the other parts of the layout without having to reconfigure
again. (You may have to restart LyX to pick up the changes, though.)
The .layout will probably input some .inc files from the same directory, and
some of these will need to be modified as well. I just used the same scheme
described above for customizing them: clone them under a new name, include
the new one rather than (or in addition to) the original in the new .layout,
and then start hacking the .inc to suit your requirements.
The nice thing about this stepwise customization is that you always have
something that works well enough to test, even though you may not have all
the desired features implemented. Once you've done it once, it's not as
complicated as it sounds, and the only remaining problem is the LaTeX
expertise. But there are plenty of good LaTeX books, and for the hard
problems you can get free advice from various newsgroups and mailing lists.
If you'd like I could mail you my customizations as examples. My examples
are fairly baroque, but they may have a few more comments than those included
with the installation.
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
