Tips on Book Creation
Using LYX
During the process of writing a book on POSTGRESQL,
I learned number of tricks. I required output of both HTML
and PDF formats. I used:
- LYX 1.04,
- teTEX 0.40
- Alladin Ghostscript 6.0 for PDF
- Alladin Ghostscript Adobe-35 fontset
- Bitstream 500 fontset
- Latex2html 98.1p1
Tips for LYX:
- Read all the documentation under the Help menu.
- I modified LYX to allow word-wrap of of multi-word typewriter
text. Patch sent to maintainers, available on request.
Tips for TeTEX:
- Use the vruler package from
for numbers in the margins.
- Use the hyphenat package from
with the htt option to allow word-wraping in typewriter font.
- I use hyperref to generate PDF bookmarks and links.
- Use \interfootnotelinepenalty=300 to keep footnotes
from splitting across pages.
- Add your Latex configurations to your LATEX preamble in LYX.
- Read dvips.dvi to see how fonts are installed in TEX. I generated
my own tfm and vf files for my fonts because the encoding
of the TEX-supplied fonts do not match the fonts I have. This is
seen in certain PDF viewers, like Adobe Acrobat, which
can't render ligatures, like fi and fl, and special
symbols. I had trouble generating proper smallcaps, but finally figured
it out. I have a script for this at the end of this paper.
- You will need to define any new fonts in the nfss font system
for seen by TEX.
- Any additions to the TEX directory tree requires texhash
to be run.
Tips for Ghostscript and PDF:
- PDF files contain fonts embedded in the PDF file. There
are two types of fonts in PDF files, Postscript Type 1 and
Type 3. Type 1 fonts are outline, curved fonts, that look good on
screen and in print. They scale to any size. Type 3 fonts are bitmap
fonts that look fine on paper, but don't look good on screen. They
look bad in gv, ghostview, and xpdf, and terrible in
Adobe Acrobat.
- Ghostscript 5.50 and earlier could render Type 1 fonts in PDF
only for the standard 35 Adobe fonts. Non-standard fonts are
rendered as Type 3 fonts. It also only worked for Latin1 encoding.
Newer Ghostscript versions do not have this limitation.
- When testing PDF files, start Acrobat, and choose File/Document
Info/Fonts. Then choose List all Fonts. That will show the
type of fonts in your document. I only have one Type 3 font called
A with encoding Custom, which represent bullets.
All the rest are Type 1.
- Alladin has a nice set of the 35 standard Adobe fonts. However,
the encoding does not match the standard encoding defined in the TEX
tfm/vf files, so you will need to generate new files for these
fonts.
Tips for LaTex2html:
- Disable image sharing with -reuse 0 or set REUSE=0 in
latex2html.config. Image sharing is broken for my uses. It
thinks certain figures are the same, when the are different.
- I used \begin{latexonly}...\end{latexonly}
and htmlonly in the title page to control that LATEX sees
and what latex2html sees.
Recommended books for LATEX fine-tuning:
- Lamport, Leslie LATEX: A Document Preparation System, Addison-Wesley
- Goosens, Mittelback, Samarin The LATEX Companion, Addison-Wesley
- Knuth, Donald The TEX Book, Addision-Wesley
Here is the script I use to install new TEX fonts:
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https://momjian.us/presentations