On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Praedor Tempus wrote:
> I NEED to be able to place a box symbol AND a box rotated 1/4 (a diamond) and
> a vertical oval. I can only find a box and diamond symbol in the Document
> Layout window under bullets. I don't want bullets, I want the characters in
> my text. These symbols are not available as a special math characters or any
> other character except bullets, as far as I've been able to determine.
>
> How can I use them in a normal paragraph as symbols?
The bullet dialog is a collection dingbat, math and standard LaTeX symbol
characters. In the text field below the character map you will see the
equivalent latex for a given symbol.
It seems likely you want to use the \ding(110) and \ding(117) characters
(being a block and diamond respectively) so you can do this in LyX by
either adding:
\usepackage{pifont}
to the preamble and then Insert->TeX
\ding{110}
into your document.
OR
The alternative is to use one of the ding characters (any of them) for one
level of your bullet points (Itemize environment). This will make LyX add
the \usepackage line for you and then you only need to worry about adding
the ding character wherever you need it.
##
I'm not aware of any vertically aligned oval shapes or even horizontally
aligned ones. If someone finds a horizontally aligned one you can do
something like:
\usepackage{rotating}
\newcommand{\voval}[0]{%
\raisebox{1pt}{\begin{turn}{90}\whatevertheovalcommandis\end{turn}}}
in your preamble. Note that the raisebox is used for correction of the
baseline of the character and the value I used is just a guess. That is,
to align the character the text around it once it has been rotated. It's
also likely you'd need to kern the space around that character (close up
or move away the adjacent characters). You may also need to scale the
character (probably just using \tiny, \small or one of the other standard
LaTeX sizes would be sufficient).
You can then Insert->TeX:
\voval
into your document.
I'm not sure but I think you can create an oval from a circle if someone
can tell you how to squish it. Probably some variation of the scaling
commands which I don't know anything about.
Allan. (ARRae)
