On 07/13/2011 09:34 AM, Eric Weir wrote: > I am conscious of the fact that this may be the kind of excessively broad > question that makes it difficult for knowledgeable people to be helpful. > Nevertheless, since I am to a large extent at a loss regarding the answer I > will ask it: Where do I start? Perhaps better, how do I go about creating a > layout for a document type. At this point the document would be very simple, > e.g., a few pages, a flush left title with up to three lines of single spaced > bold text using the same font only slightly larger than the body text, and a > few flush left bolded section heads using the same font the same size as the > body text. > This is an advanced matter. I'd guess that very few LyX users ever venture into writing full layouts for documents; I'd even guess that most never write any layout at all, even simple modules. Rather, most LyX users choose a document class and let it do the formatting for them, without worrying too much about how the document looks, precisely. Of course, if you're self-publishing a book, or typesetting one for a publisher, or whatever, you have different sorts of requirements. I recently had to write a document class for a book I'm publishing with Oxford University Press, for example. It had to match, more or less, the specifications for one of their book designs. It took a while to get right, but now I have it, and others can use it, too.
LyX uses LaTeX to do all the formatting, so customizing document appearance means getting one's hands dirty with LaTeX. The sort of thing you want to do would probably be quite easy with the memoir class, or perhaps with one of the koma-script classes (probably the article one, since it looks as if you do not need chapters here), all of which provide "hooks" for customizing the appearance of the headings, title, etc. Both of these have extensive documentation (memman.pdf, scrguien.pdf), and various people here have plenty of experience with these classes. (Not me.) You can also ask questions on comp.text.tex. As I said, that is the LaTeX side of things. On the LyX side, you have to write a layout file for your new class. If it's based on the koma-script article class, scrartcl.cls, say, then this is fairly easy. Let's say your new class is myclass.cls. Then you copy scrartcl.layout to myclass.layout and make a few modifications, so the document looks in LyX kind of like it looks when printed. In fact, you do not even have to make those modifications, if you don't want to do so. How things look in LyX does not control how they look when printed. If they look different in LyX, oh well. This part is documented in LyX's Customization manual. Richard
