On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 5:44 PM, Jacob Bishop <bishop.ja...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Steve Burnham <dan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for getting back to me, much more information and more helpful
>> than I expected.
>>
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> If you don't mind, I'd like to keep this discussion on the list. This is
> because our discussion might eventually help someone with similar issues. I
> spent over a year using the mailing list archives to find solutions to
> problems I encountered before actually composing a message myself or
> subscribing to the list.
>
>
>> I have the thesis office minimal examples which unfortunately doesn’t
>> compile. I’m attaching the zipped file of the data that I can get from the
>> office. I started trying to modify the chap2.tex file to compile. I added
>> in the document class declaration, \begin{document}, and some text for the
>> headings. I get two errors, that I need to specify a style guild for which
>> I cannot locate information on that error online. The other is that it
>> cannot find \begin{document} which is weird because it is there. I’m
>> guessing whatever the document guild error is has something to do with it
>> since that is the first error listed. If you have time you can take a look
>> at the file and maybe help me figure out what is wrong.
>>
>
> After reverting your changes, I was able to get the example to compile (I
> didn't try to deal with the references, but we can do that later). To
> explain how, I think I should cover how the example is intended to work.
> There are several ways to write a LaTeX document. One is to write it all
> into a single document...a single file ending in *.tex An alternative
> method is to use a "parent" file with several "children" files. The
> children documents don't actually compile themselves. That's why when you
> try to compile "chap2.tex" it doesn't work. It doesn't have everything it
> needs to be a standalone .tex document. Child documents are intended only
> to be "included" in the main (parent) document. In the archive you sent,
> the parent file is called "MyThesis.tex" and each chapter and appendix has
> its own file. These can be seen in the main document. They are included
> with the \include{} statement. Incidentally, it is also possible to use
> child documents with LyX in the same way, but I think that is a discussion
> for another day.
>
> After getting a successful compile using "pdflatex MyThesis.tex" at the
> command line, I decided to roll the "included" files right into the main
> document. That seems simpler to me in a way. See attached. That completes
> step 2!
>
> I also got ambitious and started on the conversion. The steps for that
> basically involved (a) creating a simple .layout file, (b) copying most of
> what appears in MyThesis.tex ( the part before \begin{document} ) into the
> preamble of LyX (c) re-creating the document within LyX. For (a), your
> layout file actually worked. You can see the results (a) and (b) in the
> attached (MyThesisR1.lyx). That gets us through step 5 outlined previously.
> I even worked on step 6 a bit. The latest of those results are in
> MyThesisR3.lyx. Why don't you see if you can duplicate my results and let
> us know how it went?
>
> It seems that LyX is a good way to write LaTeX documents if you don’t have
>> a lot of knowledge about LaTeX but importing custom classes and styles
>> appears to be quite a chore.
>>
>
> I fully agree. In my opinion, the difficulty in creating and importing a
> custom class/style is one of the biggest hurdles we face. As long as there
> is an existing template that works, things are pretty smooth. The nice
> thing about it, though, is that just one person needs to create and import
> a template. It only has to be done once. Thesis/dissertation templates is
> one case where this effort makes quite a lot of sense IMHO. Custom formats
> for one-time 1-5 page documents much less so.
>
>
>> In any case, it should be worth it especially since I am starting my PhD
>> this summer and will need the same style guide.
>>
>
> I agree.
>
>
>> Thanks again for your help, it’s just too bad you moved a little too far
>> north for your PhD!
>>
>
> Either that, or you didn't move far enough north for yours! :)
>
> -Jacob
>
OK, so overall success. I was able to modify the files myself and get them
to compile in LaTeX. I found the whole parent/child document thing a
little confusing at first. Not the concept so much but just syntax and how
they are structured. Should anybody else be looking for help in the future
I found the following video where you can actually see somebody create a
parent/child document and it cleared it up for me (
https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/latex-guides/beginners-tutorial/longer-documents-in-latex.html#.U02Qt-ZdVIY).
So now when I open up LyX I can go File>Import>LaTeX(plain) and import
MyThesis.tex and it opens and compiles just fine in LyX. I think now my
questions are:
1. What is the difference between MyThesis.lyx and MyThesisR3.lyx. From
what I can tell R3 has the ERT cleaned up in the preamble as well as notes
signifying the different heading levels
2. From what I can gather it is the .layout file that will get rid of the
ERT in the LyX file. I tried to follow an example thesis .layout file from
the LyX site (see here: http://wiki.lyx.org/Layouts/UCThesis) but when I
modify the file I can no longer get anything to compile. (See attached
.layout file to see what I did.)
3. I also cannot figure out where both LyX and LaTeX are getting the front
matter pages like the title page, copyright page, and abstract. All I can
find is in the preamble are entries like \titlepage, \copyrightpage
-Steve
uuthesis.layout
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