On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, William R. Buckley wrote:
LyX/LaTeX are not WYSIWYM because it makes decisions about where I want text and graphics to be. Well, let me put this claim under suspension, while I test the various alternative *frame* mechanisms that have been suggested by others.
You can write your own class or style that overrides and changes the defaults. That's what many publishers (e.g., Spriger-Verlag's monoclass, and the theses classes of many universities) do. Make the output _exactly_ how you want it, then you'll have consistent results from document to document and you won't have to think about it again.
One point of decorum, please, do not confuse Ventura Publisher with the limitations associated with brochures and pamphlets. VP is first and foremost intended for the production of large volumes, including multi-volume books. It is a dream tool for those who edit and publish collections of essays. To boot, it will handle a publication of many thousands of pages, all while allowing you to adjust the position of a period at the end of a particular sentence. It you want, it will layout the text for you. If you want, it will let you layout the text with the finest degree of control. That choice is yours.
On the other hand, TeX was invented by Don Knuth because in the 1970s and 1980s there were no satisfactory tools to typeset mathematical formulae and symbols well. From what I've heard and read, Word and PowerPoint slavishly adhere to this practice. So, TeX was designed as a book typesetting system. The next year, Leslie Lamport brought it from the level of assembly language to that of C by providing the LaTeX macro system. LyX adds a GUI front end; I suppose to finish the programming language analogy it's not like Visual Cobol, but more like an IDE (java beans, perhaps?)
Perhaps I express naïveté but, why does every .lyx document contain only one LaTeX file? Would it not make sense for *box* and its kind to contain separately TeXable source? LyX could then at a higher level piece a document together, page by page, outputting the image to a PDF, or what have you?
Probably for the same reason that those who process words write separate documents (e.g., chapters) then assemble them into a whole by using a master document. Rich -- Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | Integrity Credibility Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Innovation <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863
