Hello Andreas, On Fri, Dec 20, 2024 at 4:53 PM Andreas Plihal <a.pli...@gmx.at> wrote: > > I keep getting advice from your community. But unfortunately, instead of > speaking with a consolidated voice committed to a long-term strategic goal, I > am faced with many seemingly isolated advisors. > > Over the last few years, this advice has unfortunately been inconsistent. In > this way, LaTeX, TeX and LyX counteract their most important advantage, > namely that LaTeX is supposedly such a stable software solution. The > contradictory advice, its fickleness (today this way, tomorrow that way) and > the short life of software packages that have just been hyped form a basis > for unstable solutions. My project, which I have been pursuing for more than > two years now, is subject to this instability.
The fact that you get different advice does not necessarily indicate something on the stability of TeX. As for the "short life of software packages", if this is about my advice to not use mdframed, you don't have to listen to that, and it does not mean the package won't work, it is just that it is not maintained. It has not been maintained since 2013, so it means if you encounter any bugs, you might not get any help resolving them. You can check these kinds of details yourself before choosing to depend on a package for your project. > In order to motivate the community gathered here to come up with more > sustainable solutions, I would now like to present my project. (Perhaps I was > too naive and should have done this at a much earlier stage.) > > I am writing a KOMA book about mathematics. In printed form, it already has > about 300 pages. Therefore, my willingness to fundamentally overthrow the > technical concept for its realization at this point in time - and some of > your advice goes exactly in this direction - is at an end. I am prepared to > fundamentally revise my book once again - from a technical point of view. But > the new concept must have a solid foundation. > > In addition to normal text, my book contains various directories and visually > separable units: Theorems, proofs, definitions, remarks, examples, exercises, > solutions tbc. > > I had solved these units in an earlier version with the help of color boxes. Please be precise. What exactly do you mean by "color boxes"? LaTeX has several ways of constructing objects which are usually referred to as "color boxes". >However, the handling of these color boxes has changed drastically in recent >years. I have placed texts, formulas and graphics in these color boxes. The >texts often flowed around the graphics. This has changed. Text-covered >graphics can no longer be handled as easily as before. It used to be possible >to specify how many lines of text could flow around the respective graphic. >This is no longer possible. I made quite a few requests during this phase >because it disrupted my entire pagination and, based on the advice here a la >lounge, I gave up my concept with the color boxes with a heavy heart. Again, without actually knowing what precisely you are referring to it is hard to tell or check what has happened. What did you use before to wrap text around graphics? wrapfig? > I gave it up in favor of artificially generated boxes (usually called > “theorems”). Theorems in LaTeX are not always inside boxes (by default they are not), what do you mean by "artificially generated boxes"? LyX Layouts? >So I have completely revised my entire book in this respect. Now I'm getting >to the point where I want to automatically generate a list of all my theorems >in my appendix. Since I couldn't solve it myself, I asked again. Now I hear >that I should use color boxes instead of the (allegedly) outdated theorem >solution (package mdframed etc.). You are mixing two independent things here, theorem environments, and colored boxes. mdframed, like tcolorbox, is a package mainly focused on creating and customizing colored boxes, both packages has some native support for theorems, but you can use, in additions to them, a package that focuses on defining and customizing theorems environments, such as thmtools and keytheorem. It all depends on your needs. And the advice was about future projects, not to change anything right away. As for a solution, did you not see the attachment in my last email? Is there something wrong with it? > I was even advised to abandon LyX altogether in favor of LaTeX. Do the > advisors actually realize what that would mean for me? This is exactly the > instability I was talking about above. It was advised since you use a lot of ERT, which is usually counter productive in LyX. > In the appendix I am sending you only excerpts from both versions (the entire > PDF files are more than 5 MB each) so that you can get an idea of where the > journey should go or where it should have gone. > I will send you the LyX files in full length, where GDG-Kopie corresponds to > the PDF file GDG-Farbboxen and GDG corresponds to the PDF file GDG-mdframed. The LyX files do not contain much details, as most of the content is in included files which you did not send. > I hope that I have been able to better describe my problem situation with > this detailed description. If you, dear community, would like to present me > with a new but sustainable concept for my project, or at least outline one, I > would be very grateful. Can you elaborate on why the presented solution is not OK? Udi -- lyx-users mailing list lyx-users@lists.lyx.org https://lists.lyx.org/mailman/listinfo/lyx-users
