Stefaan Lippens' webface

When making a document with Lyx (or LaTeX), I often create figures and diagrams in XFig. I know, Xfig's user interface sucks big time. (I tried the Java port JFig, but that one even feels worse to me.) However, the main reason I bite the bullet is that it enables a work flow where the text you add to the XFig figure is typeset by LaTeX when you compile the document. This way, the text in the figure is in the same font as the normal text in the document and, maybe more importantly, you can use all the fancy LaTeX commands, e.g. to put mathematical expressions, symbols and formulas in your figure.

To make this work, one of the required things is to enable the "special" flag on the text objects in XFig, and use a LaTeX font. These things are disabled by default and manually setting for every text object is a bit tedious. To changes these defaults, you can start xfig from the command like with the following options:

For writing with LaTeX I prefer using LyX because it hides the ugliness of LaTeX source code behind a pseudo-WYSIWYG frontend (the developers call it WYSIWYM: what you see is what you mean). Including mathematical expressions, however, is very LaTeX minded and comfortable: you type LaTeX math constructs (stuff with _, ^, \sum, ...) and LyX directly visualises it as a pretty printed formula. For the advanced LaTeX constructions not available in LyX's interface one can always fall back om "raw LaTeX" input fields. In short, I think LyX is a very handy compromise between the power of LaTeX and the user friendliness of a WYSIWYG system.

Sometimes, for example when writing an article for a conference, one need to use a custom LaTeX document class, recommended by the conference author guidelines. The procedure to make LyX using this custom document class is non obvious and a bit involved. It is broadly explained in the LyX manual (Part Customization, Chapter 5 Installing New Document Classes, Layouts, and Templates), but here is the short version (for teTeX on Linux or related systems, I don't know about Windows):