I recently needed to turn a big LyX document into a number of Word
documents (one for each chapter). Because the export to OpenOffice
format no longer worked on my system (I couldn't find oolatex in a new
install of MiKTeX 2.9), I resorted to pasting from the pdf to Word.
Using non-default fonts in LyX this meant that all bolding (section
headings) and emphasis (as italic) was preserved. The big problem in
pasting from a pdf is that each line in the pdf is treated by Word as a
separate paragraph. I worked around that by noting that the final line
of most paragraphs was shorter than the lines in the paragraph body, but
there were enough exceptions to make the process only semi-automatic.
Thinking about this later, it would have helped if the first word of
each paragraph was a different colour -- say, red -- and I could have
searched for that. Colour, like bolding and emphasis, is preserved on
pasting into Word (at least for non-default fonts).
With sectioning commands, you can create a module containing lines like
Style Section
LatexName newsection
Preamble
\newcommand{\newsection}[1]{{\centering\section{\emph{#1}}}}
EndPreamble
End
and in the usual classes with bold upright headings, all sections will
now be bold and italicised and centred -- or not, depending on whether
one adds the module to the document or not.
It would be very nice if a similar thing was possible for Standard
style: if the LatexName is dummy, as at present, nothing happens but if
a different LatexName is used, as with newsection in the example, LyX
passes the command on to Latex, so that a module with
Style Standard
LatexName notdummy
Preamble
\newcommand{\notdummy}...
EndPreamble
End
and a suitable definition of \notdummy, would enable the first word of a
paragraph to be reddened or whatever other effect one wanted, depending
on whether the module is added to the document or not.
It would give LyX something like (La)TeX's \everypar facility. The
trouble with \everypar is that it is reset, \everypar={}, with every
section command (at least in my experiments) so that it doesn't apply
document-wide. The proposed mechanism would. Presumably it would involve
something like \everypar={\notdummy}, but it would be set by LyX with
every paragraph.
Andrew Parsloe
