chapter heading on blank page and too much text in chapter heading

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Sometimes, the header has way to much text. The page number, chapter
number, and chapter name all get jammed together and doesn't look nice.

An example is from the Lyx User's Guide when printed at 6"x9":

14CHAPTER 2. LyX SETUP AND SUPPORTING APPLICATIONS

The page number is right next to the CHAPTER.

Is the best idea to fix the chapter name? Or could the header be improved
to only show the first two words for example? Any ideas?

Also when a left page at end of a chapter is blank, it still have the
chapter header. It seems like just the page number would be good enough on
blank pages. What do you think?

I am using LyX 1.3.4. (Now I think I should try newer or CVS version
before posting....) The document class is book and the page style is
headings.

Jeremy C. Reed

BSD News, BSD tutorials, BSD links
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/

[Rich Shepard]

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
14CHAPTER 2. LyX SETUP AND SUPPORTING APPLICATIONS
Is the best idea to fix the chapter name? Or could the header be improved
to only show the first two words for example? Any ideas?

AFAIK, there are two options: short titles or fancy headers. I've used
both short titles and shortening the chapter or section name.

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
Also when a left page at end of a chapter is blank, it still have the
chapter header. It seems like just the page number would be good enough on
blank pages. What do you think?

I think the designers of the various classes used standard or common
designs. However, if something like this is important to you, then by all
means make the changes. :-) The memoir class will give you more options and
abilities for tweaking.

One of the strengths of LyX (also LaTeX and TeX) is that professional
typographers and page layout designers do all the heavy thinking. I just
pick a document type and concentrate on the content rather than the
appearance. I'll change "Abstract" to "Executive Summary" when warranted,
but otherwise I ignore the details.

YMMV,

Rich

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Post by Rich Shepard

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
14CHAPTER 2. LyX SETUP AND SUPPORTING APPLICATIONS
Is the best idea to fix the chapter name? Or could the header be improved
to only show the first two words for example? Any ideas?

AFAIK, there are two options: short titles or fancy headers. I've used
both short titles and shortening the chapter or section name.

I am trying to figure out how to get it so the chapter name and number is
only on the left even pages and the section name and number is on the
right side of the odd pages.

\fancyhead[RO]{\slshape \thesection}
\fancyhead[RE]{}
\fancyhead[LE]{\slshape \thechapter}
\fancyhead[LO]{}

The above works (in my preamble) to show numbers, but I don't have the
actual chapter name.

When I try to define a \chaptermarker, then both become blank. I tried
several ideas; here is one I tried:

\renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{%
\markboth{\chaptername
\ \thechapter.\ #1{}}

I am trying to figure this out from reading fancyhdr.dvi (Dec. 16, 2002)
document.

For example, I want on left side of even page:

Chapter 2. LyX Setup and Supporting Applications

And I want on the right side of odd page:

Section 2.3 Setting up the X Keyboard

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Jeremy C. Reed

BSD News, BSD tutorials, BSD links
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/

[Rich Shepard]

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
I am trying to figure out how to get it so the chapter name and number is
only on the left even pages and the section name and number is on the
right side of the odd pages.
\fancyhead[RO]{\slshape \thesection}
\fancyhead[RE]{}

Jeremy,

The blank should not be necessary; that's why we specify position and
page.

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
\fancyhead[LE]{\slshape \thechapter}
\fancyhead[LO]{}

Ditto.

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
The above works (in my preamble) to show numbers, but I don't have the
actual chapter name.

There are three page references in TCL2 to "\thechapter", but none
addresses exactly what is included. I'm sure that an additional variable
(the section/chapter titles) needs to be included, but I don't find the
reference off-hand. There are more experienced folks here who can help more
than can I.

Rich

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Post by Rich Shepard

Post by Jeremy C. Reed
\fancyhead[RO]{\slshape \thesection}
\fancyhead[RE]{}

Jeremy,
The blank should not be necessary; that's why we specify position and
page.

This is what I ended up doing for now:

\fancyhead[RO]{}
\fancyhead[RE]{}

The blanks worked for me. The above does:

On odd page, place on left side of page: "CHAPTER 6. MORE TOOLS". (I want
this lowercase.)

On even page, place on left side of page: "6.4 SPACING, PAGINATION AND
LINE BREAKS". (I want this lower case and I want it justified to right
side.)

It is not what I want, but it works. What I want is to get rid of the
repeated header on odd and even -- it gets crushed together and I don't
need to read it twice when I have a book open.

I want on even pages, placed on left side of the page: "Chapter 6. More
Tools".

And I want on odd pages, placed from right side of page: "6.4 Spacing,
pagination and line breaks".

Post by Rich Shepard
There are three page references in TCL2 to "\thechapter", but none
addresses exactly what is included. I'm sure that an additional variable
(the section/chapter titles) needs to be included, but I don't find the
reference off-hand. There are more experienced folks here who can help more
than can I.

I think it is by using a #1 as I read in the fancyhdr.dvi documentation. I
just can't get it to work using the examples in that file.

Jeremy C. Reed

BSD News, BSD tutorials, BSD links
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/

[Jack T. Gill]

I've been monitoring this list for a couple of months. I was intrigued by
LyX and it being a WYSIWYM program. However most of the activity I've seen
on this list seems to be from folks having problems tweaking LyX, i.e.,
changing the settings or adding ERT to reformat the output to what they
want. To me that's no longer WYSIWYM, but seems to be what I've done for
years with OpenOffice or in Word---typing the content and formatting the
output.

Does anyone use LyX right out of the box (or download) without all the
tweaking? If so, to what use are you putting it?

Thanks.

Jack

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Shepard [mailto:rshepard-***@public.gmane.org]
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 6:56 PM
To: lyx-users-UqbJ+GOpo4+***@public.gmane.org
Subject: Re: chapter heading on blank page and too much text in chapter
heading


I think the designers of the various classes used standard or common
designs. However, if something like this is important to you, then by all
means make the changes. :-) The memoir class will give you more options and
abilities for tweaking.

One of the strengths of LyX (also LaTeX and TeX) is that professional
typographers and page layout designers do all the heavy thinking. I just
pick a document type and concentrate on the content rather than the
appearance. I'll change "Abstract" to "Executive Summary" when warranted,
but otherwise I ignore the details.

YMMV,

Rich

--
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: [phone]

[Rich Shepard]

I've been monitoring this list for a couple of months. I was intrigued by
LyX and it being a WYSIWYM program. However most of the activity I've seen
on this list seems to be from folks having problems tweaking LyX, i.e.,
changing the settings or adding ERT to reformat the output to what they
want. To me that's no longer WYSIWYM, but seems to be what I've done for
years with OpenOffice or in Word---typing the content and formatting the
output.
Does anyone use LyX right out of the box (or download) without all the
tweaking? If so, to what use are you putting it?

Jack,

You're reading too much into what you see. For the really easy stuff no
one writes to ask for help. It's only when you don't know how to do
something (e.g., remove the date from the title page; place a special
character, have multiple equations with one number and caption, put multiple
figures or tables in the same float).

On the other hand, I'll bet you don't use winWord or OO.o "out of the
box", either. Never used Word (yea, team!) but have used OO.o since
WordPerfect bit the dust about 5 years ago. In OO.o one must set the page
size (unless A4 is your default), specify font style, size, margins and so
on for your defaults. If you want templates then you need to create those,
too. Nothing works for everyone as built.

What sort of writing do you do? Have you produced documents using the
article, report and/or book classes? If so, do they meet your needs? If the
defaults (and you still need to configure LyX when you carefully take it out
of the box) are acceptable, then use it and ignore the traffic here. When
you want to do more, or customize the output to fit a specific need (e.g., a
thesis/dissertation template, journal template, whatever) and you need help,
just write and someone(s) will respond to you.

This is, without doubt, one of the most useful mail lists to which I
subscribe. I learn as much by reading how others' problems are resolved as I
do when my problems are resolved. Also, if you're serious about using LyX
buy yourself a copy of "The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition" (TLC2). Not
only is it a complete reference but it will show you what you can do to make
the output match your design.

Once things are set up, just write. The formatting, typesetting and other
heavy lifting is done for you.

HTH,

Rich

[Jack T. Gill]

Thanks to Rich and others for their comments.

I'm a chemist and am currently interim chair of a chemistry department at a
medium-sized, state supported university. LyX intrigues me as it seems to
offer the potential of enabling us to assist our students in writing their
theses and dissertations. It's difficult enough to write the content of an
acceptable thesis or dissertation in chemistry, and having the additional
challenges of formatting offloaded would be a great help to all. If we had
a document class that meets the university's formatting requirements, then
both the students and the students' graduate faculty committees would be
relieved of the continual format editing that inevitably falls to them.

However I doubt if any students or faculty would avail themselves of LyX if
they were faced with the requirement that they learn LaTex programming.
When the additional learning curve for incorporating chemical structures is
added to the mix, the prospects of convincing them to use LyX dims even
further.

I've searched for dissertation classes (Google, etc.), and have found a few,
but those I found are either very old (in computer years) or are not
appropriate for chemistry and/or our university's formatting requirements.
All would require "tweaking".

I dread the possibility of having to write a document class for Lyx, as I am
new to it all. However that may be the only way to get the LyX tool in the
hands of our students.

Are there any chemists on the list that use LyX for theses, dissertations,
or with American Chemical Society styles?

Jack

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Shepard [mailto:rshepard-***@public.gmane.org]
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 9:46 PM
To: lyx-users-UqbJ+GOpo4+***@public.gmane.org
Subject: RE: chapter heading on blank page and too much text in chapter
heading

I've been monitoring this list for a couple of months. I was intrigued
by LyX and it being a WYSIWYM program. However most of the activity
I've seen on this list seems to be from folks having problems tweaking
LyX, i.e., changing the settings or adding ERT to reformat the output
to what they want. To me that's no longer WYSIWYM, but seems to be
what I've done for years with OpenOffice or in Word---typing the
content and formatting the output.
Does anyone use LyX right out of the box (or download) without all the
tweaking? If so, to what use are you putting it?

Jack,

You're reading too much into what you see. For the really easy stuff no
one writes to ask for help. It's only when you don't know how to do
something (e.g., remove the date from the title page; place a special
character, have multiple equations with one number and caption, put multiple
figures or tables in the same float).

On the other hand, I'll bet you don't use winWord or OO.o "out of the
box", either. Never used Word (yea, team!) but have used OO.o since
WordPerfect bit the dust about 5 years ago. In OO.o one must set the page
size (unless A4 is your default), specify font style, size, margins and so
on for your defaults. If you want templates then you need to create those,
too. Nothing works for everyone as built.

What sort of writing do you do? Have you produced documents using the
article, report and/or book classes? If so, do they meet your needs? If the
defaults (and you still need to configure LyX when you carefully take it out
of the box) are acceptable, then use it and ignore the traffic here. When
you want to do more, or customize the output to fit a specific need (e.g., a
thesis/dissertation template, journal template, whatever) and you need help,
just write and someone(s) will respond to you.

This is, without doubt, one of the most useful mail lists to which I
subscribe. I learn as much by reading how others' problems are resolved as I
do when my problems are resolved. Also, if you're serious about using LyX
buy yourself a copy of "The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition" (TLC2). Not
only is it a complete reference but it will show you what you can do to make
the output match your design.

Once things are set up, just write. The formatting, typesetting and other
heavy lifting is done for you.

HTH,

Rich

--
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: [phone]

[Helge Hafting]

Post by Jack T. Gill
Thanks to Rich and others for their comments.
I'm a chemist and am currently interim chair of a chemistry department at a
medium-sized, state supported university. LyX intrigues me as it seems to
offer the potential of enabling us to assist our students in writing their
theses and dissertations. It's difficult enough to write the content of an
acceptable thesis or dissertation in chemistry, and having the additional
challenges of formatting offloaded would be a great help to all. If we had
a document class that meets the university's formatting requirements, then
both the students and the students' graduate faculty committees would be
relieved of the continual format editing that inevitably falls to them.
However I doubt if any students or faculty would avail themselves of LyX if
they were faced with the requirement that they learn LaTex programming.
When the additional learning curve for incorporating chemical structures is
added to the mix, the prospects of convincing them to use LyX dims even
further.
I've searched for dissertation classes (Google, etc.), and have found a few,
but those I found are either very old (in computer years) or are not
appropriate for chemistry and/or our university's formatting requirements.
All would require "tweaking".
I dread the possibility of having to write a document class for Lyx, as I am
new to it all. However that may be the only way to get the LyX tool in the
hands of our students.
Are there any chemists on the list that use LyX for theses, dissertations,
or with American Chemical Society styles?

If you have your own special formatting requirements, then a new Lyx document
class is needed. That may need some work, but the good thing is that
it is a one-time job. Once you have a class then everybody can use it -
without any latex tweaks at all.

If you don't want to write a lyx class yourself, consider giving the job
to a student. Perhaps you have some that are interested in typography
and computers?

Helge Hafting

[Kenward Vaughan]

Hi Jack,

Post by Jack T. Gill
Thanks to Rich and others for their comments.
I'm a chemist and am currently interim chair of a chemistry department at a
medium-sized, state supported university. LyX intrigues me as it seems to
offer the potential of enabling us to assist our students in writing their
theses and dissertations. It's difficult enough to write the content of an

...

I unfortunately do not have these issues at my community college (or is
that just fortunate?? ;-) and so cannot help you directly.

I _do_ use LyX for virtually everything I create for my chemistry
classes. In particular, all exams and lab handouts, including those
for organic.

Post by Jack T. Gill
However I doubt if any students or faculty would avail themselves of LyX if
they were faced with the requirement that they learn LaTex programming.

My own experience has been that this is minimal outside the issue of a
document class, and is well addressed by the resources available
through the LyX site (including this excellent email list).

An FAQ list could also be generated by those pioneering its use for
later consumption by the following masses. :)

Post by Jack T. Gill
When the additional learning curve for incorporating chemical structures is
added to the mix, the prospects of convincing them to use LyX dims even
further.

...

Hmm. There are several apps available for generating structures that
work well.

While some LaTeX packages do exist which generate drawings directly in
one's document, I have fallen away from them (in part due to poor
maintenance) in favor of simpler solutions such as chemtool or
xdrawchem. I now use chemtool almost exclusively despite its
simplicity and a few quirks. Exporting/printing to (e)ps files is
available with these apps (though I haven't tried using the ps files
generated with xdrawchem's print system).

Xfig (the backend for chemtool) fills in nearly all the rest of my
needs.

Incorporating eps figures into LyX documents is not a difficult task.

There is also a cute little app called chemeq which generates LaTeX for
chemical equations (among other things). I don't use it much as I have
my own style for doing that, but it's there...

Hope this helps,


Kenward

[Les Denham]

Post by Jack T. Gill
Does anyone use LyX right out of the box (or download) without all the
tweaking?  If so, to what use are you putting it?

I've used Lyx for more than four years, and rarely do anything you could call
"tweaking". Some of the things I've used it for are:

Technical proposals, ranging in size from a few pages to over a hundred pages.

Geological reports, usually 50 to 200 pages, with many figures.

Five sail-training manuals of 30 to 100 pages.

A 400 page novel.

I generally do not use Lyx for very short documents (two pages or less),
though yesterday I used it to make two pages of notes on the contents of five
data CDs.

My biggest problems with Lyx come from colleagues, publishers and clients who
insist on receiving documents in MS Word format. Lyx does not have a
solution for that. One approach I have used is to prepare the document in
Lyx, then export as ASCII; open the ASCII file in OpenOffice and save it in
MS Word format. Then I send both the MS Word document and a PDF file
generated from Lyx, so the recipient can see how much better it could look.

My other major problems come from people who insist on sending me MS Word
documents. While Lyx often does a reasonable job of importing MS Word
documents, the result is an unstructured Lyx document which is hard to modify
as you would an ordinary Lyx document. My usual solution is to import the MS
Word document into OpenOffice, convert the whole document to "Default" style,
and save in text format. Then I import that plain ASCII file into Lyx, and
go through the document, setting styles by hand.

[Rich Shepard]

Post by Les Denham
I generally do not use Lyx for very short documents (two pages or less),
though yesterday I used it to make two pages of notes on the contents of
five data CDs.

Les,

I'll second that. When I write letters or must share a document with those
stuck with Microsoft software I use OpenOffice.org. Otherwise, all "serious"
writing is with LyX.

Post by Les Denham
My biggest problems with Lyx come from colleagues, publishers and clients
who insist on receiving documents in MS Word format.

The greatest irony is that O'Reilly Associates (publishers of some of the
best UNIX/linux books) insists that their authors submit book text in MS
Word! O'Reilly also sponsors OSCON (the Open Source Convention) and promotes
open documents, too. So, why do they demand the use of a terrible,
proprietary word processor when they can get camera-ready, typeset
submittals as .tex files? Shrug. It's a real shame.

My publisher (Springer-Verlag) has LaTeX class files. I easily converted
the svmono.cls into a LyX layout and sent them the book that way.

Rich

[Matej Cepl]

Post by Rich Shepard
The greatest irony is that O'Reilly Associates (publishers of some of the
best UNIX/linux books) insists that their authors submit book text in MS
Word! O'Reilly also sponsors OSCON (the Open Source Convention) and
promotes open documents, too. So, why do they demand the use of a
terrible, proprietary word processor when they can get camera-ready,
typeset submittals as .tex files? Shrug. It's a real shame.

Even worse, O'Reilly are one of the powers behind DocBook!

Matej

[Helge Hafting]

Post by Jack T. Gill
I've been monitoring this list for a couple of months. I was intrigued by
LyX and it being a WYSIWYM program. However most of the activity I've seen
on this list seems to be from folks having problems tweaking LyX, i.e.,
changing the settings or adding ERT to reformat the output to what they
want. To me that's no longer WYSIWYM, but seems to be what I've done for
years with OpenOffice or in Word---typing the content and formatting the
output.
Does anyone use LyX right out of the box (or download) without all the
tweaking? If so, to what use are you putting it?
Thanks.

I use lyx for anything I need to write on paper or PDF. I can do lots of
tweaks but rarely have to. I have made a couple of document classes
that fits my work. I don't use lyx for email, plain text is the format
of choice for that. I don't want to bother others by forcing them to start some
extra program to read mail - all mail readers support text directly.

Note that good formatting in all cases, and satisfying all sorts of layout
constraints _is_ hard - no program can help that. Lyx can come further,
but the task itself is complicated so even a full-featured future lyx
will force beginners to ask for help. Today, the hard stuff lies in latex
commands and such. With support for everything built-in, the problem will be
which of thousands of menus to use to get some specific effect.

You can see this already, not all the answers here deal in latex commands.
Some go along the lines of "insert a float with such and such options,
then use insert->special char->hfill in order to . . ."

Those that want to play with advanced typography will need to learn a lot,
even if they don't want to learn latex. But predefined classes usually gets
the work done.


Helge Hafting

[Subir Singh Lamba]

Hi,

While writing a documents in lyx I am facing a strange problem of space
between the text and the mathematical equations. At some places the
space is more than normal. I have removed all the spaces after and before
the "math dsiplay". The "space" use to be the source of abnormal space
between the text and equations but not in this case.

Thanks,

Subir

[Helge Hafting]

Post by Subir Singh Lamba
Hi,
While writing a documents in lyx I am facing a strange problem of space
between the text and the mathematical equations. At some places the
space is more than normal. I have removed all the spaces after and before
the "math dsiplay". The "space" use to be the source of abnormal space
between the text and equations but not in this case.

Are you talking about horizontal spacing, similar to the spacing between
words, or vertival spacing such as the spacing between paragraphs?

Latex tries hard to fit whole undivided paragraphs on the pages, and will
stretch or compress vertical spacing in order to achieve this. This means
that the spacing between paragraphs of text, the spacing between headings and
text, and the spacing above or below display math may vary a good deal. The
alternative is substantially worse: small paragraphs split across pages,
a single line ending a paragraph on the next page, or a heading at the very
end of a page.


Helge Hafting