Text classes

Different sorts of documents should be typeset differently. For example, books are generally printed double-sided, while articles are single-sided. In addition, many documents contain special environments: letters contain some environments -- such as the sender's address and the signature -- which do not make sense in a book or article. The LYX text class^3.1 takes care of these large scale differences between different sorts of documents. This Tutorial, for example, was written in the Book text class. Text classes are another major part of the WYSIWYM philosophy; they tell LYX how to typeset the document, so you don't need to know how.

Your document is probably being written in the Article text class^3.2. Try changing to other text classes (using the Layout $\triangleright$Document dialog) to see how they are typeset differently. If you change your document to the Book text class and look at the Environment menu, you'll see that most of the allowed environments are the same. However, you can now use the Chapter environment. If you're ever unsure about which environments you can use in a given text class, just consult the Environment menu.

Font sizes, one- or two-column printing, and page headings are just some of the ways journals' typesettings differ from one another. As the Computer Age continues to mature, journals have begun accepting electronic submissions, creating L^ATEX ``style files'' so that authors can submit correctly typeset articles. LYX is set up to support this as well. For example, LYX supports typesetting (and extra environments) for the American Mathematics Society journals using the Article (AMS) text class.

Here's a very quick reference to some of the text classes. See the Special Document Classes section of the Extended Features manual for many more details.