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<h1>Professional Tex(t)Authoring with LyX</h1>
<h4>ArticleCategory: [Choose a category, translators: do not
translate this, see list below for available categories]</h4>
Applications
<h4>AuthorImage:[Here we need a little image from you]</h4>
<img alt="this is me" src="../../common/images2/GerritRenker.jpg" width="175" height="213"><br>
<h4>TranslationInfo:[Author + translation history. mailto: or
http://homepage]</h4>
<p>original in en <a href=
"nospam:gerrit.renker(at)gmx.de">Gerrit Renker</a></p>
<h4>AboutTheAuthor:[A small biography about the author]</h4>
<p>Graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer networking.
Various jobs before and, if open source is not here to stay,
various jobs thereafter.<br>
</p>
<h4>Abstract:[Here you write a little summary]</h4>
This article is written for people who have a lot of text
editing/authoring to do and are primarily interested in getting
a text edited in a fast, reliable, well-formatted way without
having to put in <b>(a)</b> lots of wordprocessor skills or
<b>(b)</b> guru-level LateX knowledge. The main tool that this
article describes is LyX, an extremely robust and powerful
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X frontend based
on a client-server architecture.
<p>The article is not so much an application overview, but
rather concentrates on the writing process and summarizes
experiences of using LyX on a day-to-day basis for five years.
Other issues, such as versioning or which graphics to use, are
also discussed, as well as additional tools that are helpful
for document preparation.</p>
<h4>ArticleIllustration:[One image that will end up at the top
of the article]</h4>
<img src="../../common/images2/article368/lyx_logo.jpg" alt="[Illustration]" hspace="10" width="270" height="183">
<h4>ArticleBody:[The main part of the article]</h4>
<h2>Motivation</h2>
<p>Imagine you have to hand in two texts until some close date
in the very near future, a report describing your recent work
progress and a small user manual for a piece of software which
has just matured. There won't be extra credits for using cute
layouts and flashy special fonts, in fact you are not worried
about such issues. All you want is to get over with writing the
text, once it is done one could maybe jazz up the layout a bit,
but that is not of primary importance.</p>
<p>There are usually two choices, either one uses a GUI-based
word processor or resorts to source - level
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X editing. The
first has the advantage of direct control on the layout process
- in fact it is more of a layout program than an editing tool,
which lead to the acronym <b>WYSIWYG</b> (<i>what you see is
what you get</i>). The second is very robust software with a
very high print quality. It however follows a different
paradigm, <b>WYSIS</b> (<i>what you see is source</i>) and has
some learning curve, especially for newcomers. As little as you
would care about fancy headings when writing a text, you are
not likely to be enthusiastic about having to dig into source
code when the primary focus is the text itself, not its
embellishments or markup. I was precisely in this situation
four years ago, I didn't know any
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X, got
production-ready within half a day and had a big document with
lots of illustrations and references ready quite soon
afterwards, all thanks to LyX.<br>
</p>
<p>LyX is exactly in the middle of the above two paradigms, it
is called <b>WYSIWYM</b> (<i>what you see is what you
mean</i>), quoting [<a href="#lyx-intro">1</a>(see
references)]:<br>
</p>
"<b><i>LyX is a program that provides a modern approach to
writing documents with a computer by using a markup language
paradigm, an approach that breaks with the obsolete tradition
of the 'typewriter concept.' It is designed for authors who
want professional output quickly with a minimum of effort
without becoming specialists in typesetting. The job of
typesetting is done mostly by the computer, not the author;
with LyX, the author can concentrate on the contents of her
writing.</i></b>"
<p>Editing in LyX is done in a GUI environment, no source code
is needed (but can be inserted in extra blocks when required).
Have a look <a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/first_example_of_editing.jpg">here</a>
which shows this article text at an early stage.<br>
</p>
<center>
<br>
<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/first_example_of_editing.jpg">
<img alt="" src="../../common/images2/article368/first_example_of_editing_th.gif" border="0" width="400" height="307"></a><br>
</center>
<p>The gray box that you see is a cross-reference, you can
click on it and edit the reference. This edit window is not to
be confused with the output, LyX generates a <i>text file</i>
which can then be translated into
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X. You can view
the complete output by pressing <b>ALT-d</b>, which pops up a
DVI window <b>(DVI=device-independent-format, an intermediate
file format used by
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X)</b>,
<b>ALT-t</b> does the same for postscript. The capitalised
variants <b>ALT-D</b>, <b>ALT-T</b> are used when you want to
update changes you made in the editor window.</p>
<p>The procedure is thus similar to the typical
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X-editing process,
with the advantage that you have the structure of the text
sitting in front of you, not cluttered by source code tags.
With pure
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X-editing the
temptation is often, comparable to word processors, to increase
a little font size here, change a little environment setting
there and in summary do lots of things that have only remote
relevance for the text itself.</p>
<p>In summary, when you need a reliable text authoring tool and
want to concentrate on the text itself, LyX is a strong
recommendation. Its clear strengths are managing large
documents (which can be split into pieces), its integration
with other software detailed below and its incredible
robustness. Since less main memory is spent on the cycle of
actualising the current layout, there is much less of a
slow-down when editing large documents. I have heard about word
processor programs crashing under large files (and producing
irreparable binary garbage). LyX is text-based and when
forcefully aborted (e.g. power-down) leaves an emergency file;
even with the most bizarre settings and huge text lengths I
could not witness a decrease in performance. I have been using
it during the last five years almost on a day-to-day basis and
out of nearly 800 pages of authored text, some huge, not lost
more than half a paragraph. As a bonus,
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X code can be
sourced into LyX via the <b>reLyX(1)</b> script.</p>
<p>If you really would prefer to do source-level editing of
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X, a look at <a
href="http://kile.sourceforge.net/">kile</a> may be of
interest, it is a KDE editor especially for
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X with additional
features.</p>
<h2>Getting started</h2>
<p>This article differs from the earlier one in March <a href=
"../../English/March1998/article31.html">
1998 (article 31)</a> in that it provides less general introduction, instead
I will just point where to get the information and summarize
how to get there. Instead of doing a <b>graphical
walk-through</b> here (as initially planned), if you have not
seen LyX before, I highly recommend to do the following tour
through the editing process, it also describes how to get your
hand on the first document in a very nice manner: <a href=
"http://www.lyx.org/LGT/">http://www.lyx.org/LGT/</a></p>
<h3>Prerequisites</h3>
<p>The first thing to do is to check whether
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X is already fully
installed on your system. In RedHat/Fedora systems this is
quite conveniently possible via the graphical package installer
which has a single tick-box for the entire
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X distribution.
You can manually check via</p>
<pre class="code">
rpm -qa | grep tex
</pre>
<p>which should list the following packages (assuming you have
the TeT<small>E</small>X implementation of LaTeX):</p>
<ul>
<li><b><tt>tetex</tt></b> and <tt><b>tetex-latex</b></tt>
(base packages)</li>
<li><b><tt>tetex-afm</tt></b> (a PostScript font converter
for T<small>E</small>X)</li>
<li><b><tt>tetex-xdvi</tt></b> (for previewing <b>.dvi</b>
files)</li>
<li><b><tt>tetex-doc</tt></b></li>
</ul>
The last is very useful if you want to check out different
packages, this documentation resides in
<tt>/usr/share/texmf/doc/index.html</tt>. As further
prerequisites, check for <b>aiksaurus</b> (a thesaurus to be
used while editing) and, more importantly, for the
spell-checker <b>aspell</b>. Aspell also has packages for
several non-English languages. In LyX this spell-checker is
activated via <b>F7</b> (<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/spellchecker.jpg">screenshot</a>).
<h3>Installation</h3>
<p>LyX comes in two flavours now, the older x-forms variant
(which at times was a little tricky to build) and the modern Qt
variant which I'd say is preferable. RPMs for both variants are
available, under <b>debian</b> the installation is as easy
as</p>
<pre class="code">
apt-get install lyx lyx-common lyx-qt ## or lyx-xforms if you prefer
</pre>
<p>If you would like to build the sources yourself, these are
at <a href="http://www.lyx.org">www.lyx.org</a>. You might find
the following <a href=
"../../common/src2/article368/build-lyx_sh.txt">build script
(build-lyx.sh)</a> useful.LyX is a small coding masterpiece,
everything is written in C++ and compiled from scratch and the
build process takes longer than building a kernel.</p>
<h3>Configuration</h3>
<p>LyX needs to check your installation first. Upon first
editing, run <b>Edit -> Reconfigure</b>, which updates the
internal database. When changing anything to your
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X installation,
this step should also be re-run. The results of this step can
conveniently be browsed under <b>Help ->
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X
Configuration</b> which also tells you where to get potentially
missing packages. It pays to enable <i>autosave</i> under
<b>Edit -> Preferences</b>, this is an inexpensive and very
useful option to take. The default viewer for output is
<tt>xdvi</tt>, it is highly recommendable to set this to
<tt>kdvi</tt>, as shown in this <a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/configuring_kdvi.jpg">screenshot</a>;
this will give you an easy-to-use viewer. Changed settings are
not applied until <b>Modify</b> is pressed.</p>
<h2>3 Editing and producing output</h2>
<p>Writing costs <b>(i)</b> inspiration (creativity) and
<b>(ii)</b> transpiration (manual work). I found that it really
pays off to put in the effort and learn 10-finger
''touch''-typing. There are cheap books out with some exercises
and after a couple of weeks one is able to write without all
these terrible two-finger search system typos. To make hard
work a fun game, check out <a href=
"http://ktouch.sourceforge.net/">ktouch</a> which is made
exactly for learning touch-typing. It starts, like play
station, with an easy level and you can go on to higher and
higher levels. It is really nicely made, ships with the
<b>kdeedu</b> package or can be found on <a href=
"http://ktouch.sourceforge.net/">http://ktouch.sourceforge.net/</a>.</p>
<p>For the <i>inspirational part</i> - getting a structure
together before starting with th e work, there is a very
helpful article about <i>text outliners</i> and <i>mind-mapping
tools</i> in [<a href="#key-1">2</a>(see references)].</p>
<h3>Basic editing</h3>
<p>There is not much to say here since the interface is fairly
self-explanatory, if you get stuck check out the <a target=
"_blank" href="http://www.lyx.org/LGT/">graphical tour</a>
mentioned above. Let's say you have some preliminary notes
which sit in some textfile created on your favourite hand-held.
This can be imported via <b>File->Import</b> (either line by
line or as block) and so there is a rough structure. This can
now be converted into text segments, the <i>listbox</i> on the
toolbar presents the options allowed by the chosen style file.
Usually one can set <i>standard</i> via <b>ALT-p s</b> and
<i>headings</i> via <b>ALT-p n</b> where <b>n</b> is a number
from 1..6, the smaller the number the bigger the heading. For
things you don't want to see in the output, you can use
<i>notes</i> via <b>ALT-i n</b>, shown in the following figure
as the blue area.</p>
<p align="center"><a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/using_notes.jpg"><img alt="" src="../../common/images2/article368/using_notes_th.gif" border="0" width="400" height="307"></a><br>
</p>
<p>Once the text is ready you can use <b>View</b> and check it
or export it (<b>Latex, PDF, Ascii, HTML</b> <b>(see notes
further down),</b> <b>...</b>) via <b>File->Export</b>.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p align="justify">
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X fun starts with
the excessive choices of section, subsection, page, image,
table <i>crossreferences</i> plus the external bibliographical
data. To be able to <i>reference</i> something in the text,
first a <a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/making_a_label.jpg"><i>label</i></a>
needs to be created via <b>ALT-i l</b>. Any text can be used
for labeling, but spaces within are to be avoided. Having done
that, this label can be back (and forward) referenced anywhere
in the text by simply inserting it via <b>ALT-i r</b> (for
reference), which gives you a choice of referencing modes. For
quoting <i>URLs</i> within the text, use <b>ALT-i u</b>
instead.<br>
</p>
<center>
<br>
<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/pybliographer_2.jpg"><img alt="" src="../../common/images2/article368/pybliographer_2_th.gif" border="0" width="400" height="314"></a><br>
</center>
<p align="justify">With regard to <i>bibliographical
references</i> there are two choices:</p>
<ol>
<li>Create a <i>bibliography section</i> manually at the end
of the document by selecting '<b>Bibliography</b>' from the
style selector.</li>
<li>Use an external <i>BiBteX database</i>, which is
referenced by putting in <b>Insert -> Lists&TOC ->
BibT<small>E</small>X Reference</b> (as many as you want, put
at the end of the text).</li>
</ol>
For the first option you can check the first version of this
article <a href=
"../../common/src2/article368/lyx_article_lyx.txt">here
(lyx_article.lyx)</a> for an example. If you have never seen a
<b>BibTeX database</b> before, here is an <a href=
"../../common/src2/article368/example_bibtex_database_bib.txt">example
file (example_bibtex_database.bib)</a>. You see, it is simply a
standardised text-markup of bibliographical data. And it is not
at all necessary to mess with that, since there is a wonderful
<i>database tool</i> called <b><a href=
"http://www.pybliographer.org">pybliographer</a></b>. It allows
the complete management of all such databases including
incremental multi-attribute text search and conversion into
other formats, e.g. HTML. Here is a screenshot showing an
incremental search.<br>
<center>
<br>
<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/pybliographer_1.jpg"><img alt="pybliographer" src="../../common/images2/article368/pybliographer_1_th.jpg" border="0" width="400" height="269"></a><br>
</center>
When you have set up one of the two alternatives, you can use
the <i>bibliographical references</i> anywhere in the text via
<b>ALT-i c</b> (for citation), see <a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/bibref_.jpg">here</a>. But
there is an even smarter way which shows the flexibility of
LyX. <a href="http://www.pybliographer.org">Pybliographer</a>,
as well as some other tools, can interface with the LyX server
process. This happens via the <tt>$HOME/.lyx/lyxpipe.in</tt>
(and <tt>lyxpipe.out</tt>) <i>pipes</i>. The server protocol is
described in detail in the LyX documentation, here it suffices
to say that you can simply hit '<b>Cite</b>' on pybliographer
to insert the reference that you have just rediscovered as part
of an incremental database search. For other applications, this
communication protocol opens ways such as automatically
generating text from scripts and ... you choose.
<h3>Version control</h3>
<p>This is especially useful when the text is longer and
changed several times. LyX comes RCS-ready, it is simple to set
up.</p>
<ol>
<li>create a directory named <b>RCS</b> in the same directory
where you keep the LyX source</li>
<li>edit the LyX file and go to <b>File -> Version Control
-> Check In Changes</b> (<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/RCS_log.jpg">text
dialogue</a>)</li>
<li>next time you open the file, you get a dialog like this
<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/RCS_retrieval_question.jpg"><img alt="" src="../../common/images2/article368/RCS_retrieval_question_th.jpg" align="middle" border="2" width="87" height="30"></a><br>
</li>
</ol>
You can use all the usual RCS commands from the commandline
(<tt>man <b>rcs</b></tt> or <b><tt>rcsintro</tt></b>). I
usually just use <b><tt>rcs -l</tt></b> to create a lock,
<tt><b>co -l</b></tt> when I want to lock upon checkout and
<b><tt>rcsclean</tt></b> to remove all unchanged files. If you
are the only author, disable strict locking via <b><tt>rcs -U
<file></tt></b>, which considerably simplifies the
proceedings.
<h3>Math stuff</h3>
<p>If you need to edit many formulae then
LyX/L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X provides one
of the best facilities for this purpose. To check out <i>math
mode</i>, enter it via <b>ALT-m m</b> (yes twice) and then you
can pick any symbol from <b>Insert->Math->Math Panel</b>.
LyX recognizes when you type in LaTeX math commands - try for
instance <b>ALT-m m</b> and then the sequence <b>\mathcal P</b>
then <i>space</i> then <b>\frac (n-1)</b> TAB <b>2</b>.</p>
<h3>Graphics</h3>
<p>A variety of graphics formats can be used. Encapsulated
postscript (<b>.eps</b>) is often the best option when
producing PS output, but <b>.png</b>, <b>.jpg</b> and
<b>.gif</b> also work. You can put in images directly via
<b>ALT-i g</b> (graphics), but it is better for the layouting
to use so-called <i>floats</i>, which are just a wrapper and
allow several placement options as well as a descriptive
caption text. To produce a float, use <b>ALT-i a</b> and then
'<b>Figure</b>'; when right-clicking the outer frame you can
force the position (to some extent, this is LaTeX, not a
layouting program).</p>
<h3>Document settings and layout formats</h3>
<p>I haven't spoken much about the <i>layout format</i> of the
document, which is set via <b>Layout->Document</b>.
Depending on what LyX has found during its test-run, there is
normally a standard selection of formats such as article,
report, letter, book etc. By choosing one of these, the layout
of the entire document is changed. This directly affects the
list of styles available on the left of the menu. Internally,
these choices are LyX-layout wrappers around the LaTeX document
classes. Further below, I give a small example how to hack such
a layout (which is not too hard). But for the most purposes,
one of the given formats should more than do, as these can be
complemented with additional, selectable features.</p>
<p>An interesting option are the use of
<b><i>templates</i></b>, in particular the letter
template. Templates are just text files which can be
modified, e.g. for your own letter format. Try <b>File ->
New from Template</b>. This opens the template view in
<tt>/usr/share/lyx/templates</tt>. Very nice is for instance
the <b>g-brief</b> (German ''Geschäftsbrief'' = business
letter) which works for those envelopes which have a little
transparent address window on the left. The bright-blue text in
a template is invisible for the output and just hints where to
fill in the text.</p>
<h3>Generating output</h3>
<p>LyX hides the internals of
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X compilation away
from you, it creates a temporary directory in <tt>/tmp</tt>
which you can look at:</p>
<pre class="code">
ls -l /tmp/lyx_tmpdir*/lyx_tmpbuf[0-9]/*
</pre>
<p>This is useful to know when exporting to HTML. In all other
formats (<b>PS, PDF, Ascii,
L<sup><small>A</small></sup>T<small>E</small>X, DVI</b>), LyX
simply creates the desired file in your current directory. With
HTML, it copies the HTML page, but not the images and
style-files that come with it and are generated by
<tt>latex2html</tt> - these can simply be copied from the
temporary compilation directory. Lastly, to produce output you
don't even need the GUI, <b>lyx(1)</b> has a number of
commandline options, for instance to <i>generate a PDF file</i>
from a given source file, simply type</p>
<pre class="code">
lyx -e pdf my_lyx_source_file.lyx
</pre>
<p>which produces a fresh one. I use this for a larger
repository of documentations where PS and PDF files are
generated automatically by a script from LyX input files.</p>
<h2>Internals and general tips</h2>
<h3>Errors, the preamble and hyperlinks</h3>
<p>If the LaTeX compilation fails, an error box is produced
like the one on the left.<a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/you_should_try_to_fix_this.jpg">
<img alt="" src="../../common/images2/article368/you_should_try_to_fix_this.jpg" align="left" border="0" width="307" height="159"></a> Usually, <i>context-sensitive
error location</i> is quite good and you can jump to the error,
which is marked in your document by a red Error box, via
<b>ALT-g</b>. If that does not help, try to look at the
stderror output (assuming you have started LyX from some xterm)
or try <b>View -> Latex Logfile</b>. In some occasions you
may be in trouble because a certain <i>document style</i> was
not included (e.g. '<b><i>package xyz not found</i></b>'). This
can easily be fixed by adding it in the Latex preamble, which
serves the same purpose for Latex documents as the
<tt><head></tt> section does for HTML, i.e. declaration
of style files, inclusions etc. To access the Preamble, select
<b>Layout -> Document -> Preamble</b>. For instance, you
can add<br clear="all">
</p>
<pre class="code">
\usepackage{url} %% for URLs (also in Bibtex)
\usepackage{ae,aecompl} %% generates nicer PDF output (better fonts)
\usepackage{hyperref} %% best at the end, generates PDF with hyperlinks
</pre>
<p>The last one, hyperref, is well worth checking out. You
probably know these PDF documents which have clickable, colored
links in them and a bookmarks section where you can choose the
section you want to jump to. Such documents are created by
using the hyperref package. Just be sure to add it last in the
list since it overrides settings from other packages.</p>
<h3>Useful paths</h3>
<p>Apart from making <i>emergency backups</i> and auto-saving
files, LyX also keeps a backup of every file in
<b><tt>$HOME/.lyx/backups</tt></b>. If you have accidentally
deleted a LyX file, you can find the latest copy there. This is
also the place where user-defined style-files are kept
(<tt>$HOME/.lyx/layouts</tt>). If you create one or more style
files for yourself, put them here rather than in
<tt>/usr/share/lyx/layouts</tt>, since the directory contents
get erased on every new installation or update of RPMs. I found
it a good habit to back up <tt>$HOME/.lyx/</tt> on a regular
basis.</p>
<h3>Adding LATEX styles</h3>
<p>If you need to add new style-files for LyX (and LaTeX) to
use, there is a two-way process. <b>First</b> the style file
needs to be placed in a directory where LaTeX can find it.
Usually, you can use any subdirectory of
<tt>/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/</tt>. To avoid that an RPM
update accidentally clears this, it is a good idea to create a
subdirectory (e.g. my_style_files) and to back it up regularly.
Once the new style file resides in that directory, the <i>LaTeX
configuration</i> needs to be updated, which is as simple as
running</p>
<pre class="code">
texhash
</pre>
<p>(as root). If you are curious, you can also try
'<tt>texconfig</tt>'. Required style files can in almost all
cases be found on <a href="http://www.ctan.org">CTAN</a>. The
<b>second step</b> involves to run <b>Edit->Reconfigure</b>
under LyX and then restart it.</p>
<h3>Roll your own layout</h3>
<p>Okay, this is the sixty second tutorial to defining your own
document flavour. Since we are under Lunix, we can exercise the
classical virtues of software reuse to make something
new. Suppose you are a professional tourist and want to
write a catalog entry about interesting holiday experiences.
You would like to have something which starts a new section
with bold-face words like ''my exciting holiday experience
number ...''. LyX expects a text layout description file which
tells it <b>(a)</b> which Latex packages to use (here we will
simple use the standard <tt>article</tt> package) and
<b>(b)</b> what you want to support environment-wise in your
document. The first important bit are the top two second lines
which should read something like:-<br>
</p>
<pre class="code">
#% Do not delete the line below; configure depends on this
# \DeclareLaTeXClass[article]{article - about holiday stuff }
</pre>
<p>The argument in square brackets gives the LaTeX package(s)
to use, you can insert several separated by commata. The second
argument tells LyX how to label this style; after you have
saved the file in <tt>$HOME/.lyx/layouts</tt> and run
<b>Edit->Reconfigure</b>, you will actually read the string
''article - about holiday stuff'' (or whatever you choose to
call it) under <b>Layout -> Document -> Layout ->
Document Class</b>. But we are not finished yet. First we
simply import an existing layout called <tt>article.layout</tt>
(no paths necessary, LyX searches its layout directory or
<tt>$HOME/.lyx/layouts</tt>)<br>
</p>
<pre class="code">
Input article.layout
</pre>
<p>Next we construct a suitable LaTeX command which has to go
into the preamble (document header). To put something into the
preamble we use the <b>Preamble</b> environment.<br>
</p>
<pre class="code">
Preamble
\newtheorem{holiday}{My funniest holiday experience Nr. }
EndPreamble
</pre>
Last we need to tell LyX how to use this command
<pre class="code">
Style My_Holiday
Margin First_Dynamic
LatexType Environment
LatexName holiday ## this issues the Latex command
AlignPossible Block, Left
LabelType Static
LabelString "Holiday Experience #. " ## this you will see in the document
End
</pre>
<p>After editing this <a href=
"../../common/src2/article368/a_modified_article_layout.txt">file
(a_modified_article.layout)</a>, store it in
<tt>$HOME/.lyx/layouts</tt>, reconfigure, restart and
voilá - you now find an environment called ''<b>My
Holiday</b>'' in the style selector. <a href=
"../../common/images2/article368/unforgettable_experience.jpg">Here</a>
is an example document which uses the new <a href=
"../../common/src2/article368/a_modified_article_layout.txt">style
(a_modified_article.layout)</a> file. More information can be
found in [<a href="#custom">3</a>(see references)]. </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Certainly, if you only have to write your shopping list or a
two-paragraph memo, using LyX is somehow overkill. But if you
are looking at texts of more than 500 words where working with
structure and crossreferences is a must, you can expect a
serious degree of work relief from LyX.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://wiki.lyx.org/">LyX wiki</a><br>
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.lyx.org/internet/mailing.php3">LyX
Mailing list</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.texnik.de/">Tips &
Tricks</a> </li>
</ul>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<a name="lyx-intro">[1]</a><i>''Introduction to LyX</i>''. By
the LyX Team. Available under <b>Help ->
Introduction</b>.<br>
<a name="key-1">[2]</a><i>''<a href=
"http://linux.open.ac.uk/108/oregan.html">Outliners and Mind
Mapping</a></i>". By Jimmy O'Regan. Linux Gazette Nr. 108,
November 2004.<br>
<a name="custom">[3]''</a><i>Customizing LyX: Features for the
Advanced User</i>''. LyX Team. Under <b>Help ->
Introduction.</b> <!-- vim: set sw=2 ts=2 et tw=74: -->
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