New Members ⇒ hi from Sarasota, Florida

[Meta002]

Hello. I'm currently exploring whether I can successfully design my book using LaTeX. The alternative is to rent InDesign from Adobe. I would like for my book publishing project to at least break-even; avoiding Adobe's software rental fees would be helpful. Whether I go with LaTeX or InDesign, I'm faced with a steep learning curve.

I'm currently learning LaTeX with the help of LyX. I have some concerns whether LyX can scale to handle my project, but as a 'gentle' introduction to LaTeX, LyX is wonderful. I can have the LyX source, LaTeX source, and PDF all open at the same time so I can see how they relate.

Thanks to everyone working behind the scenes to make LyX & LaTeX useful publishing tools!

[cgnieder]

Hi!

Welcome to the forum!

Regards

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome,

a very good resource for learning LaTeX is LaTeX for complete novices.

LyX exports code, but auto-generated Code is never as good or reliable as human code.

[Meta002]

I'm less excited about LyX after trying to import a figure. My book has 11 figures, all generated in PowerPoint and exported as PDFs, so this needs to work reliably.

The results:
+ non-floating figure import worked OK
+ floating figure import with caption above worked OK, but with too much space between the caption and figure
+ floating figure import with caption below - no caption appeared at all

I exported the Lyx-generated LaTeX source and ran it in TeXShop. I got the same results, but all of the figure import operations had errors that I don't yet understand. This is actually good news, since fixing the errors might fix the problem with the 'caption below' scenario.

It looks like I'm going to have to learn LaTeX after all. There still may be reason to run LyX from time-to-time to see what kind of LaTeX source it generates for certain situations.

[Johannes_B]

If you open a new topic with just the reduced LaTeX code, i am sure we can find a solution together

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Welcome to the forum!

Also I suggest, post your LaTeX question with detailed information into a new thread/topic. We cannot sort the archive with LaTeX solutions with keywords "hi" and "Florida". Though that's fine for the Hello! post, nice to see that.

It's great to open a new topic for each LaTeX problem you would encounter. We have space for millions of topics. It makes answering and sorting much easier than long threads on several pages.

We gladly help also with the first steps in LaTeX.

See you in the forum,

Stefan

[Meta002]

Thanks for the offers of help. I'll do some investigating and post a question in the appropriate forum if I'm still having a problem.

[Meta002]

I solved the problem with figure import. My error is obvious in retrospect. All of the troubleshooting was done in LaTeX rather than LyX. I'll post my solution after all 11 of my figures have been successfully imported into my book.

I've successfully typeset Chapters 1 (Introduction) and 15 (Conclusion) of my book using LaTeX in TeXShop on MacOS X. I'm very pleased with the result. If I can successfully typeset my entire book for publication using LaTeX / TeXShop, then I will owe a huge debt to the many people who have contributed to the development of LaTeX and its tools over the years.

I used Dodson's book skeleton as a starting point (http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~kd/l ... dfbyex.htm) and created my own book skeleton using the memoir document class (many other changes to Dodson's example were also made). I'll post my book skeleton after I get more experience using it.

I figure that if the default settings for the memoir class get me 90% of the way to a satisfactorily-typeset book, then I will be more than happy to dig into the 600+ page memoir documentation to finish the last 10%. So far, this strategy seems to be working.

[Johannes_B]

LaTeX is developed further each day, packages get more features to ease input and consistency of documents. Unfortunately, that makes information on the internet go bad and everything should have a best before end label attached to it. The information found on the page is from 2001, and even in 2001, some of the stuff going on in there is obsolete and bad practice.

Please always refer to up-to-date stuff, for example: LaTeX for complete novices.

[Meta002]

I just completed typesetting my book (the first pass, anyway - many still to come). Some stats:
+ 203 hours of work expended since July 1
+ memoir class with default page layout generates a PDF with 163 pages

Overall, I am very pleased with the power and flexibility of LaTeX, despite the steep learning curve. It's difficult to beat the cost, too.

Would using LyX saved me any time, or just caused me more aggravation? How about InDesign? I'll never know ...