One of my frustrations using LyX (and there are very few!) is finding an
elegant way to easily mix layouts. I may simply be ignorant of how to
do it correctly.
Here's an example. As a long time (La)TeX user I've developed my own
set of handy environments that I use in addition to the standard ones.
I simply \input{macros}, and I'm off. I'd like that same functionality
in LyX, but with the ability to use those environments without resorting
to ERT.
The way I've been doing this so far, and it's really a kludge, is to
create a local layout (in ~/.lyx/layouts) called "stdlists.inc". I
create a symbolic link to the real stdlists.inc ones and call it
"dist-stdlists.inc". My stdlists.inc contains my environments, and
Includes dist-stdlists.inc. That way my environments are available in
all layouts (assuming I use layouts which include stdlists.inc), and the
symbolic link ensures that I'm never out of sync with the real
stdlists.inc.
This makes my life easier, but makes it almost impossible to work
collaboratively on a document, as all of my the collaborators would have
to perform this "behind the scenes" configuration. This is just not
practical.
I could create a layout specifically for each document that I need to
share, but that's nuts! I couldn't recommend this approach to my
colleagues who are just starting out with LyX either. It really really
steepens the learning curve.
I think that a practical solution would be to allow the user to
interactively select multiple layouts. LyX would essentially build a
wrapper layout file which would include them. That way one could create
a library of "sub"-layouts which could be used interchangeably with
very little effort.
Thanks,
Diab
