Peter Bowyer wrote:
Hi,
I am one of the people who cannot finds editing documents hard on
screen - I end up printing a copy and then working through it with a
pen, making changes and restructuring, and then typing the changes up.
I didn't find this a problem when using Word because what was on-screen
looked like the paper copy, so I didn't have to think hard about which
parts matched up. However with LyX this has become much more difficult,
because the printed copy and the editable copy don't look similar.
Now I know that people have been writing documents this way for much
longer than word processors have been around, (think of raw TeX) which
suggests it's a problem with my approach. Do you have any tips or
suggestions for making the editing process smoother?
Hello Peter,
I have two suggestions for you:
1) structure your document with sections and subsections. In general, my
documents never have more than a page inside a subsection. Even with two
pages, it's easy enough to find yourself inside the subsection. Putting
some visual markups like numbered or itemized lists would help also.
Or course the method above won't directly work if you are writing a
Roman or something like that because you would not want every paragraph
to have a title. But I have a solution for that too:
2) Encapsulate the sections and subsections in a LyX Branch. When you
are working on the document, let LyX print the Branch version of the
document. When you're done with it, just print the master document
without the branch for distribution. The added benefit is that the finer
grained sections and subsections will help you structure your document.
The next version of LyX (not sure about 1.4.2 but 1.5.0 for sure) will
help you even more because of the new outline feature that will allow to
move entire sections with a simple mouse click.
Hope this helps,
Abdel.
