LyX is a gui frontend to LaTeX. LaTeX is a collection of macros written in TeX. TeX is a complete typesetting environment. A document written in TeX can be formatted for perfect display on a printed page, screen or webpage. Writing a document in TeX is essential marking-up the content to be formatted as appropriate at a later date, the same approach used to writing HTML. As TeX is a little complicated, a set of commands written in TeX were written by Leslie Lamport and others that allowed the easier creation of documents. Yet these are still a little too much for a casual user. As a result the LyX document editor was created. It allows the rapid creation of documents written in TeX by a complete novice. It allows that creator to focus upon the content without worrying about how many page returns or spaces to put in on a particular line in order to get the document to look nice. TeX and its associated programs do the work of making the final output look pretty and professional.
LaTeX comes with a variety of templates for different types of document: articles, books and letters being just a tiny number of them. It is possible to write one's own templates in order to address a niche situation. In this case the creation of a PhD thesis for the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at U.S.C. in Los Angeles.
One of the unique challenges is the inclusion of Ancient Polytonic Greek text within the body of English text. It turns out that this is relatively trivial to do by hand editing the LaTeX file, but this was: 1)inconvenient for the target user who, while capable of using vi/emacs/nano, was not completely comfortable with these editors; 2)led to a situation in which revisions of the original LyX file would necessitate exporting the LyX file to TeX and then re-editing the Greek by hand each time. The latter especially made this approach highly inefficient.
A result was that it became necessary to create a new document class that incorporated some trivial document commands into the LyX file and added a new environment which correctly selected polytonic greek text. Attendant to this was the creation of RPM packages (for Red Hat's Fedora Core) which placed style classes in the appropriate directories.
A final, less urgent but desirable goal, is the coding of a polytonic Greek graphical input mechanism for use with LyX so that the user does not have to type the codes for each letter. This is the last stage of the project and is less important although it would be nice.
Ancient Greek
3 accents: accute, gravis and circumflex.
2 breathings: rough and smooth
1 diaresis/trema
1 subscript: iota
How to install and use TeX/LaTeX packages (e.g. Babel, Teubner, BetaBabel). Determine the TeX input path using kpsewhich tex. This is the source from which TeX attempts to find files when it encounters \input somefile.tex or LaTeX \include somefile.tex. This value is set in the TEXINPUTS environment variable echo $TEXINPUTS. See http://math.arizona.edu/~support/tex/accountpackages.php for further details. You can check to make sure the package is visible to your installation by issueing kpsewhich packagename and it will return with a path if it can find the package and a blank line if it can't. e..g. kpsewhich teubner.sty returns /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/teubner/teubner.sty. If you need to add the package then use kpsepath tex to find the current path. Choose one of the listed paths that ends with a // (which indicates search all subdirectories below this recursively) and copy the steubner.sty file in there and then update the database using texhash.