OK. You're ready to start writing. Before you do, though, there are a few things we need to mention, which will hopefully make the Tutorial more instructive, useful, and fun.
Because there's lots of information that we won't be giving you, the first thing that you need to do is find the other help files. Luckily, this is very simple. Start up LYX. Choose the User's Guide from the Help menu. You may want to load the Tutorial as well (if you're not reading it on screen already). This way, you can read them while you're writing your own file2.1. Note that once you've got more than one document open, you can use the Documents menu to switch between them. The Tutorial will not cover in detail subjects which are described in the other LYX manuals. This may make life a bit harder for you at the beginning, but it will keep the Tutorial short. It will also get you in the habit of using the other manuals, which -- in the long run -- will save you a lot of time.
In this Tutorial, we're going to assume that you have a fully working version of LYX, as well as LATEX, xdvi or some other dvi viewer, dvips or some other way of converting dvi documents to PostScript®#circledR; documents, and a working printer. This is a lot to assume. If any of this is not true, you (or a friendly system administrator) will need to set up your system. You can find information on setup in other manuals.
Finally, we've written a file to let you practice your LYX skills on. It's called example_raw.lyx. Imagine that it was typed by someone who didn't know about any of LYX's great features. As you learn new LYX functions, we'll suggest that you fix those parts of example_raw.lyx. It also contains ``subtle'' hints about how to fix things2.2. If you want to cheat (or check what you've done), there's also a file called example_lyxified.lyx which contains the same text as written and typeset by a LYX master.
The example files can be found in the examples/ directory,
which you can get to by selecting File
Open
and then clicking on the Examples button.
Open the raw document, and use File
Save
As to save a copy in your own directory
for you to work on. As you fix parts of the raw document, check to
see how those changes affect the dvi output.
By the way, the examples/ directory contains lots of other examples files. They will show you how to do various fancy things with LYX. They are especially useful to display things that (due to length or other reasons) won't fit in the documentation. After you read the Tutorial, or when you're confused about how to do something fancy in LYX, take a look at these files.