Steve Litt wrote:
On Wednesday 31 October 2007 11:41, Helge Hafting wrote:
Steve Litt wrote:
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.
You are right, the existing classes is not sufficient to write every
book in the stores. (I don't think any other word processor is
up to this task either, for that matter. The popular ones even
struggle with justified text. . .)
But a student usually don't need every formatting feature
found in a bookstore. I have had students using LyX or
latex for making 50-page reports, they had no problems with this.
The style of schoolwork usually comes second to the work itself,
the most important is that the style is consistent and don't
have lots of irritating misfeatures like headings at the
page bottom and such. LyX handles this.
Those that deal in advanced math like the ability to actually write
the math at all - and have it come out good-looking too.
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.
My point is, most students don't need that much for an assignment.
Most students who experiment with layout just mess up anyway.
Authors who actually publish & sell their stuff is very different, of
course.
Helge Hafting
