This question is still related to the recent thread:
https://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg112228.html[1]
I thought I got it right, but several unexpected problems came up and I'd like
to have your
opinion.
What I want to do is the following: I'm preparing a series of lectures that
will employ
theorem-like environments.
Several lectures are related to the same subject and so I want the enumeration
of
numbered things (equations, figures, theorems, examples, definitions, etc) in
subsequent
lectures to continue from the previous ones.
In order to guarantee the correct sequence, I'm loading in the preamble the
totcount
package. For each counter employed in a given lecture, the totcount package
creates a
new counter (equation@totc, figure@totc, etc), which contains the last value of
the
counter.
The values of these counters are then written in a specific file (call it
previous.tc), which
can be read in the subsequent lecture. Finally, by using
\setcounter{<counter>}{<last value>}
I can guarantee the desired continuation of the enumeration of things.
For the native LaTeX counters (equation, figure, etc), I've been including all
the necessary
commands in an ERT with the layout InPreamble.
For the native counters, this works all right because the counters are defined
with the
class and class packages, which are read before user-specific definitions
incuded with the
InPreamble layout.
However, for the theorem-like environments, the implementation is more
involved. The
problems that are coming up are:
1. Say a given environment like theorem is only introduced from the second
lecture. In
this case, the file previous.tc will not contain the last value of the counter
thm@totc,
because there was no theorem in the first lecture. Hence, I cannot issue a
\setcounter{thm}{<last value>} because in this case the number of the first
theorem gets
increased for each LyX/LaTeX compilation.
This complicates the implementation of the custom theorem-bytpe module I've
been
tinkering with in my previous thread. Somehow I need to introduce instructions
to read
the previous.tc file and find out if the counter thm was previously employed.
Only if there
is a last value of thm@totc that I can \setvalue the counter.
I'm not sure what will be the best way to implement this. Several posts I've
been browsing
through suggest the use of TeX natives like \newread, \openin \read, etc, and
then use
some package (like xstring) that identifies specific strings in each line read.
Seems too
much trouble for me.
2. Then I decided to dumb down my approach. I will only use \setvalue for
those counters
that I know are employed in the previous lecture, as I was doing so far with
the native
LaTeX counters.
The problem now is that with the layout InPreamble, those instructions will be
written
before the ams-theorem module defines the thm counters. That is going to give
errors.
It seems that as of now there is no way to choose the ordering of the
instructions
contained in the layout InPreamble inside the document's preamble. This is
discussed in
this thread:
https://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg100172.html[2]
Therefore, the only solution that I can imagine is to write the necessary
instructions in the
user-defined preamble accessible in
Document Settings -> LaTeX Preamble
This way, I guarantee the correct ordering of the instructions.
Anyway, I just wanted to vent out my frustration that I was not smart enough to
somehow
automatize this process. This is an admittedly very specific problem, and I
don't know if
you think this can be of interest to the larger community.
--
Rudi Gaelzer
Institute of Physics
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
BRAZIL
Registered linux user # 153741
--------
[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg112228.html
[2] https://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg100172.html
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