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Using Lyx to prepare your thesis

(based on Lyx 1.5.1)

Easy way

You can use Lyx to edit the individual chapters of your thesis, but keep the main document as LaTeX. Your main document will be something like thesis.tex, based on infthesis-template.tex, and each chapter will be chap{n}.lyx, a Lyx document.

To make it easy to export the Lyx chapters to LaTeX, create a "master" Lyx document called e.g. lyx-wrapper.lyx, and set its document class (and the document class of all the chapters) to be Report. Then insert all the chapters into the wrapper document, using "Insert -- Include File", and setting the type to be "Include". Now you can export the wrapper document to LaTeX, and it will create .tex versions of all the chapter documents with all the unwanted preamble etc. stripped out -- so you can just run latex on your thesis.tex document.

-- Main.s0564993 (Zeyn) - 01 Aug 2006

Making Lyx aware of the infthesis class

Get the infthesis layout file and save it in your ~/.lyx/layouts directory. Then start LyX and select "Tools -> Reconfigure". You can select your document class under "Document -> Settings..." as "Informatics Thesis". This layout contains most of the environments from the infthesis class. To quickly get going download the sample document and sample bibliography and start editing straight away. A master-child document structure can be created by creating the master LyX document and selecting "Insert -> File -> Child Document..." and selecting individual LyX child documents for inclusion (using Include Type: 'Include'). It is not necessary to export to TeX in order to get output.

-- RonanDaly - 5 Aug 2009

Setting this up on your machine at home

The instructions above explain how to get the infthesis class running on LyX on the DICE machines. To get it running on your machine at home, you need to perform a number of other tweaks. Firstly you need the files: infthesis.cls (http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/proj/Latex/index.html) and eushield.sty as well as the accompanying eushield-*.ps files. These can be found on the Informatics network by logging into a DICE machine, and going to: /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/common/logos/ and digging around in there. Alternatively type: locate infthesis.cls into the terminal to find it's exact location (same for the other files).

Once you have these files, you need to put them into the appropriate places, so LyX can find them. In your LyX User Directory (can found in "About LyX "), open the files: styFiles.lst and clsFiles.lst. This contains all the TeX related files that LyX knows about. You need to stick the files into a safe folder (I would recommend putting it into one of the folders that existing .cls files are stored - I have mine in the LyX related folders), and add their respective paths to the .lst files.

Reconfigure LyX , and you are good to go!

You might also be interested in infthesis.pdf to find out how to configure infthesis.cls properly. This can be done under "Document -> Settings..." under the "Custom:" section of the Dialog.

Hopes this helps

-- JonathanMillin - 30 Jul 2010