First what I am doing.
Then a minor complaint.
Then I'll ask for advice.
1) What I am doing.
So far I have been writing my Ph.D. thesis (in computer science
actually much more like a math thesis) in Microsoft word 98.
However for various reasons I want my final product to be a tex
document so I am converting my word documents to lyx.
I am not overly concerned about preserving my document format
information in this conversion except for my equations.
I average 3-4 equations per line.
So I
i) marked all my word equations and converted them into
an entirely textual form. I used macros for much of this.
ii) Saved my word doc in text format.
iii) Read the text file into Lyx.
iv) saved the result as tex document.
v) am about to convert all my equation data to tex data by means
of sed or pearl scripts
vi) Then I will read the updated tex file and get all my equations
in my lyx document.
vii) Then I will restore all my other document format information
manually.
2) A minor complaint.
When I filed out a tex document and just filed it back in again
I did not get the exactly the same document. Lyx gave no
complaints when I used a (") character. But when I saved it to
tex and read it back in each (") char was preceded by a (\char)
string in red. This is not a serious problem for me but violates
the principle that lyx should be able to read in any tex document
that it creates and get back the original lyx docuement.
I don't need this problem fixed but others might.
3) A minor problem
I tried to print the users manual. However the construction
of the tex file from the lyx file failed because the file
'rotating.sty' was not found. Lyx was installed by the computer
administrators for the computer science department but they
did not have time to track down this problem. I am not a unix
expert so I have not attempted to track it down either. Any
suggestions as to what the problem might be?
4) Do you have any advice?
a) Is the approach I am taking the best one? I am unaware of
any other options or useful tools.
b) It would be very useful for me if there exists templates
for the kind of document I am creating. I need templates for
creating theorems, Lemmas, proofs etc. I also need templates for
algorithms.
c) It would be great to get a template for the creation of
an entire thesis espcially one designed for mathematics or computer
science. Where can I find such templates if they exist? I am
prepared to share any templates or documents that I create.
I will also put my final thesis on the net either in tex format
or lyx format (after my thesis has been copywrited of course).
That way any templates I create will be accessable
by others.
I did look at Scientific word before choosing Lyx.
Shientific word did have a number of templates for various
things like the ones I mentioned above. They also had
templates for various scientific and mathematical journals.
Could such templates be used with Lyx?
Thanks in advance for your time.
Ralph Boland
University of Ottawa. Ont. Canada
