pol wrote:
I am in touch with high school teachers in italy where an attempt is on
going to teach students to use latex/lyx to write down exercises, with
their development and comments.
Since probably more schools/univs in the world are involved with that sort
of prgram, i am wondering whether it is worth the effort to form an
authoritative committee to set up a syllabus, to assess student skills.
I haven't considered setting up a course in document processing
before, as everybody seems to think they know how to write on
a computer already. Still, some people could need some tips.
Some ideas:
Basic LyX usage:
* How to look up stuff in the user's guide!
* Writing in a structured way
- We use "section" and "subsection" paragraph styles to
make headings - we do not change to a big font.
Students should also know how to control to what depth
(sub)sectioning is numbered. Use the outlining feature.
- We use a "code charstyle" instead of switching to courier.
Similiar for many other kinds of markup.
- We use real tables, enumerations, bulleted lists,
we do not line up stuff with sequences of space characters.
Students should also know how to make nested
lists/enumerations. (Like this one, using "*" and "-")
* basic tables. Make them look good, not too many lines.
* Selecting a useful document class, setting page style,
one/two-page layouts, margins.
* Using floats for figures/tables and the reasons _why_ we
use floats to improve typesetting.
* Proper use of cross references, use a reference instead of
just typing the number. And why we do this.
* Let the computer do the work instead of you:
Take a look at all the things LyX+latex does, such as
proper linebreaking with hyphenation, and page
breaking that avoids putting a heading as the
last part of a page. (Some other word processors can't
even do this!)
* Writing math using the formula editor. Of course, this depends
on what the student writes about - some topics needs much more
math than others. Anyone should know how to invoke the
formula editor, and to write enough math for their curriculum.
* footnotes, margin notes
* inserting notes that isn't printed, but useful during the
writing process.
* printing, spell chekcing
Intermediate
* Multi-file documents, including cross references
between different files.
* formatting tricks like hfill and page breaks. Reasons for
not using page breaks unless absolutely necessary.
* Bibliographies, glossaries and such, needed for academic writing
* change tracking, useful for cooperation
* document branches - for tests with answers, for multilingual
or other cases where it is useful to switch parts of the
document on and off.
* Making pdf's in several ways - and why.
* boxes, minipages, subfigures. The many ways
of aligning boxes and the stuff within. Tricks like
two small figures in a single float. Box decorations.
* Advanced table usage
- longtable
- how table cell vertical alignment works - useful but a bit complicated
- multicol tricks, fixed width columns
* inserting simple latex commands.
- \dotfill and similiar simple stuff in the text
- some simple preamble stuff like \usepackage
- what went wrong if LyX suddenly can't print the document,
and how to get the document back to a printable state
* math macros - for those that use lots of math.
* math shortcuts, like quickly typing \frac or \alpha instead of looking
up stuff in the toolbars/menus.
* inserting various kinds of external material, depending on
what they need. Some needs special diagrams, some needs
xfig, some might need typeset music . . .
* installing lyx+latex on a typical computer
* setting preferences
* Setting up the toolbars you need and turning others off.
Advanced
* More latex usage
- Using the latex style files provided by some journals
- difficult but useful stuff, like changing index style
- using a font not directly supported by lyx
- special packages like chemtex for those that need them.
* Making your own LyX style file, mostly for those who
knows enough latex to do so. Easiest to do by
modifying a copy of some existing lyx style file, then
add another paragraph type or text style.
* Adding/changing converters or adding
new kinds of "external material"
Helge Hafting
