On Tuesday 17 February 2009 04:44:08 am Anthony Campbell wrote: > On 15 Feb 2009, L Duperval wrote: > > On Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:27:54 -0600, Les Denham wrote: > > > On Saturday 14 February 2009 04:09:25 pm Typhoon wrote: > > >> Memoir comes with superb documentation. Have a careful look through it > > >> and you should find the answer to all of your problems. > > > > > > I'll second that. The Memoir documentation is beyond just > > > documentation: it is a superb monograph on page layout, book design, > > > and typography. > > > > > > Les > > > > Thanks to all. I started RTFM'ing (duh!) and in the first pages of > > chapter 5 I realized that I could use the [ebook] option to get what I > > want. Everything is working now, as I expected. > > > > Now, to sit down and actually write... > > > > L > > I'm about to start setting up my fourth book in Lyx (1.6.1). My previous > three were done using the Book class in 1.5.x. Can someone kindly tell > me what would be the advantages of using Memoir (or point me to > somewhere that discusses this)? > > Anthony
Hi L Duperval, I'm going to give you a viewpoint that's uniquely mine, and you can take from it what you will. In my opinion, the main thing isn't WHICH document class you use for writing a book, it's CONSISTENTLY starting with the SAME document class so that you can learn it inside and out. I used Memoir once as a starting point, and if I remember correctly, I used Book as the starting point all the rest of my books. Now that I'm starting to get good at the Book document class, I'm using that exclusively. As Anthony says, Memoir has a lot of bells and whistles that make several things easier. As I remember, custom headers were easier with Memoir. There are also a couple things about Memoir which make it incompatible with some packages so you have to work around those incompatibilities if you need those features. Once again, I think as long as you're really good with one Document Class, you can get the layout you want in a book. As Les says, the Memoir documentation is second to none. It's a must-read for anyone writing a book, regardless of Document Class. Most of it is simply good typography and layout. Before reading the Memoir documentation, I used to format my books with .75 inch side margins and a 1 inch gutter margin. The reader had to re-find each line. Yech! The Memoir docs told me exactly how wide your lines should be, and why. In my opinion, and a lot of peoples' mileage varies, one should never choose a document class to accommodate the desired frontmatter. In my opinion frontmatter should be fingerpainted with custom environments and ERT, making little or no use of the document class's features. The fingerpainting takes about 6 hours, which is often a lot less than it takes to wrestle your document class into submission, and always less time than it takes to learn a new document class. The fingerpainting comes out EXACTLY how you wnat it, with no "settle fors". In my opinion, the part of the book that needs consistency throughout is the mainmatter, so the mainmatter should be the only section considered when choosing a document class. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
