On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 5:29 AM, Piero Faustini <pierofaust...@hotmail.com> wrote: > Hello fellow LyX users, > I have to take a decision: wether to split my doctoral thesis in different > files or not. Some people told me a thesis is HUGE and I should split the file > into chapters or parts, but I'm afraid that something goes wrong at any time > during the writing. > It will be around 300 pages italian book (600,000 characters) in koma-script, > with several Lilypond-imported examples, BibLaTeX-driven bibliography, > indexes, > cross-references, loads of tables, etc. etc. > I'm using Lyx 1.6.1 in a quite healthy Windows XP sp3 environment on the best > laptop system you could buy 4 years ago, a Dell Inspiron 9400. > I already wrote something like 1/4 of the thesis and PDF output need some 10 > seconds to be produced (less if I just refresh and made small edits) - if the > proportion is the same, I expect to wait not more than 40 seconds once the > work > is about to the end (which is annoying but won't kill): am I wrong? > Some opinion/suggestion/experience? > > > > I have converted from a big document to a single small master document that includes the separate chapters.
Here is the result, so far. My manuscript, "Stuff Worth Knowing (And Not Much More)" http://pj.freefaculty.org/stat/StuffWorthKnowing.pdf. Here are some problems I've run into. 1. Chapters that use literate programming/noweb are not processed by LyX when they are inserted into the main book. This is a long-standing known bug that we've discussed in LyX-devel email. If you have some literate markup in you chapters, it is necessary to put that material in the main document in order to force the noweb processor to manage it. 2. It is much nicer to work on the separate chapters in separate files. They are smaller, more manageable. If you are smart and you keep the chapters in separate directories, your life will be happier. If you make LaTeX mistakes, it is easier to diagnose them by looking at individual chapters. There are no show-stopping problems for me, but a few little problems. Even though each chapter setup indicates that it has a master document, and I *thought* Lyx would get a pre-amble from that master document, it appears to have no effect when I look at chapters. I want ragged-right output, and it appears necessary to put the \RaggedRight stuff in every chapter preamble. When I view chapters by themselves, they do not inherit the preamble of the master document. So I end up copying the whole preamble from the master document into each chapter. Boring. Also, it is a problem that Chapter numbering is not correct when you work on chapters by themselves. There is an easy fix to set the chapter counter in ERT at the top of the document, but it is a bit of a pain. Another problem I notice is that it is tedious to experiment with different document settings when working on separate chapters. If the main document, the one that has all the includes, is KOMA script, but then a chapter is just regular book, then when you use LyX to try view the whole document, you will get a lot of warnings about child documents of different types every time you view. When there are things to go wrong, it seems like I can usually find them. Hope that helps. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
