Often proceedings give authors sample .tex files to demonstrate how a
paper should be formatted. I generally want to make my preamble as
close as possible the sample. Usually I can trick LyX into generating
something pretty close to the sample preamble, but before submitting
manually tweak the .tex file to remove unneeded options etc. For lolz,
I spend a couple of days in LyX getting the pagination just right,
then discover that the pagination changes once I manually fix the
preabmle in the .tex file. Additionally, it is much faster to
cut-and-paste a preamble than it is to hunt round in LyX to find all
the options. For these reasons, I use a wrapper script around
pdflatex like the one below.
However I was wondering if this sounds like a good feature for LyX itself?
My suggested implementation would be that you can set an option in
Document Settings->LaTeX Preamble like "edit whole preamble". When
this option is set LyX copies the whole preamble into the text box,
and allows the user to edit it as normal text.
-- pdflatex --
#!/bin/bash
THIS_SCRIPT="$0"
echo AT "$@"
echo AT "$@" 1>&2
echo AT "$@" > /tmp/AT
echo "$*" | grep -o '\b[^ ]*.tex' | head -n1 | (
read texfile
echo TEXFILE $texfile
mv $texfile $texfile.orig
grep '^%PREAM ' $texfile.orig | sed 's/^%PREAM //' > $texfile
"$THIS_SCRIPT".strip_preamble.py < $texfile.orig >> $texfile
/usr/bin/pdflatex "$@"
rm $texfile.mod
mv $texfile $texfile.mod
mv $texfile.orig $texfile
)
-- pdflatex.strip_preamble.py --
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
preamble=True;
for line in sys.stdin:
if preamble:
if line == '\\begin{document}\n':
preamble=False
print line,
else:
print line,
--
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia
