Stefano Franchi wrote:
On 27 Jan, 2007, at 5:21 AM, killermike wrote:
[...]
I'm at the note taking stage of a book project myself. Care to
elaborate about the features which you think that Lyx is missing for
book-scale projects?
I'll just mention a couple:
1. Framemaker has the concept of a "book": a multifile work to which
you can add chapters (and indexes, etc). Once you have a book set up,
you can find and replace across chapters, change the formatting across
the whole book, etc. This makes it very easy, for instance, to switch
from draft-style to final style when printing out a publication.
LyX/LaTex still does not (and never will, I think) understand a
similar concept. The best approximation I could find is to use a
master file with several include commands and then switch to different
configuration files. It works, but is not as easy and as simple. In my
case, moreover, it's rather error-prone. I am not a very organized
person and tend to forget which config file produces which outputs,
etc. In Framemaker, all it takes is a few clicks. As for multi-file
searches, there is nothing like it in LyX. You have to open the LyX
files in an editor that allows such multi-file operation (i.e. BBedit,
on the Mac), and then go back to LyX for the real editing.
Sure, LyX can't search/replace across several documents.
While writing a book, I had no problems changing
the formatting for the whole book. Change the style of the
master document and everything else follows.
Unless you print the chapters separately - in that case I changed
changed the style file. Trickier, but not something I needed
to do often.
2. Conditional text.
As you noted, this is in LyX too these days. And it works for
headings too. . .
3. Cross-references are powerful and easier to manage. You have full
control on which part of the cross-referenced text will appear, etc.
I may not have fully understood how cross-references work in
LyX/LaTex, but it seems to me that the current facilities are rather
primitives.
What exactly is the problem with LyX cross references?
You have control of what each reference will look like, i.e.
* just the page number
* just the ref number (section number/chapter number/item number/footnote
number/...)
* "on page <page>"
* "<ref number> on page <page>"
The latter two are nice in that they will produce output
like "on previous page" when applicable, instead of blindly
using the page number everytime.
Using just the page number is nice for occations when the standard
strings "on page xxx" isn't what you want. If you want to change
the strings themselves then this can be done with some
simple latex commands.
Helge Hafting
