On Wednesday 31 October 2007 11:41, Helge Hafting wrote: > Steve Litt wrote: > > On Wednesday 31 October 2007 07:16, 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. > >> > >> Any suggestions about italian possible members? > >> > >> I am also considering to open an italian lys-users mailing list. Any > >> comments and support is welcome. > >> > >> thank you > > > > The following is my opinion -- I'm sure others have their own opinions... > > > > When you say "teach students to use latex/lyx to write down exercises", > > that can mean two different things: > > > > 1) The student is given a complete document class containing ALL the > > environments and char styles needed, so he can use LyX like a word > > processor. > > Is this a problem? LyX comes with lots of nice document > classes already. And it is the school who decides > what an exercise should look like. If they can say "use LyX", > then they can also say that "article" is the > standard layout for an exercise. Easy enough if they > don't want to make layouts of their own.
Judging by my experience writing books with book and memoir derivatives, and from dabbling with koma, no document class is complete enough to do all the things you see in the average book in the bookstore. In my case I needed to create environments to make tip boxes and warning boxes and other breakouts. I also needed to create a "story" environment in every book (I like to have stories in italics and indented right and left). I found the document class's native lists to be vertically spaced too deeply, making it more probable than necessary that the list would cross page boundaries. Unless the school's document class, packages and modifying layout file give the student EVERYTHING the student needs to format it properly, the student will be frustrated. Anyone who has used WordPerfect or MS Word is very used to creating their own styles (paragraph and character), and would be frustrated at the difficulty doing that in LyX, unless they're given a document class with supporting packages and layout file that does everything they need to do for the assignment. SteveT Steve Litt Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware http://www.troubleshooters.com/
