Martin Vermeer wrote:
> That's called an attitude problem ;-) My wife has it
> too. Lucky she has me...
:)
> > Let's take a REAL-WORLD
> > example:
>
> > My wife intends (and has the skill) to become a book
> > writer. She has writen small poems and novels on
> > Dos-Word since under the age of 10 (not all usable
> > -because of age- but still a nice provision of ideas
> > to be kept).
> > Meanwhile, she wrote University-related reports and
> > studies on the Atari (all can be saved at worst in
> > ascii).
Alice was a WP user, as was I, before I discovered LyX, wiped MS from
both of our
HD's and assured her that it was just a bit of culture shock.
Now, there is no way she would go back. Although she has a PhD in
ruminant nutrition, she now writes children's stories and plays and
teaches me now LyX tricks. She also does two newsletters and did a
cookbook.
Together we have published 6 books of poetry and prose for our writer's
group using LyX.
Wv does a good job of converting msword files to either txt or tex.
We use psutils to convert the books into 8.5 x 5.5 2up on 8.5 x 11 and
email them to a print shop. You of course would use the equivalent
metrics.
>
> > So I looked in the desktop menus and discovered
> > Lyx/Klyx. At first I though: THAT'S WHAT SHE NEEDS!
> > Then I stumbled into the problems I state in this
> > mail:
> > - no "story-book" template:
> > * no it's not a science book I want,
> > * no it's not a report I want,
> > * in French, a dialog switches from speaker to
> > speaker by line-break and hyphen (-) and I don't want
> > to type all hyphens, nor do I want a bullet instead.
I would guess someone has done this with a cls file, but it might
not be easy to find. Ask on a CTAN list.
> Thanks for the specs! Now *do* it! I believe Garst
> Reese wasn't any more experienced when he started
> on the Broadway and Hollywood styles. And that included
> LaTeX-coding. It's true that LaTeX is very science
> centred and it would be fun to see some more humanities
> stuff appear. So why not give it a try?
Please.
>
> I must warn you though... LaTeX coding is not exactly
> easy, but can be quite addictive ;-) It's all documented
> in "The LaTeX Companion". The above looks quite doable
> and limited in scope.
You probably also need something like the TeX Book. The Companion does
not
tell you about the TeX stuff that is in the class files.
> But before you start hacking you may want to check out
> that something close to what you need doesn't already
> exist. There is an incredible amount of stuff out there
> and as you say, no need to re-invent the wheel. There
> are tools for basing a class upon e.g. the pre-existing
> book class.
>
> The advantage of writing a class file for LaTeX, and
> an associated .layout file for LyX making it all GUI
> and WYSIWYG is, that you have to do it only once, and
> can do it precisely right. Then your wife is set and
> cannot even spoil things any more by making a wrong move,
> as is all too easy to do in MS Word like word processors.
I would suggest starting with the koma-script book class. It is more
european in
its orientation. I hacked it a bit for N.American books.
For story books I set section number depth to -2 to get rid of all of
those ugly numbers. Then you can use the numbered section, sub-section
etc. environments for story titles, and still have them in your TOC.
> > Did I make my point? I really would love to propose
> > LyX to my wife, instead of that damned StarOffice,
> > but I just can't.
Sure you can. Courage.
> Not YET, that is. I have the same problem... had to
> propose WP8 to my wife instead of LyX. The main problem
> for her would be incompatibility with Word formats.
>
Wv
Garst
