tex2lyx [ -c textclass ] [ -df ] [ -o outputdir ] [-n] [ -r renv1[,renv2...]] [ -s sfile1[,sfile2...]] inputfile

tex2lyx -p -c textclass [ -df ] [ -o outputdir ] [ -r renv1[,renv2...]] [ -s sfile1[,sfile2...]] inputfiles

tex2lyx -h

-c

Class. By default, when tex2lyx sees a \documentclass{foo} command, it creates a file of textclass ``foo'' and reads the LyX layout file for that class (something like /usr/local/share/lyx/layouts/foo.layout OR HOME/.lyx/layouts/foo.layout). Use -c to declare a different textclass (and read a different layout file).

-d

Debug. By default, tex2lyx gives sparse output and deletes the temporary files which were created during translation. Using the -d flag will create much more output (both to stdout and stderr) and leave the temporary files around.

-f

Force. tex2lyx will not run if the .lyx file it would generate already exists Use the -f option (carefully) to clobber any existing files.

-h

Help. Print out usage information and quit.

-n

Noweb. Translate a noweb (aka literate programming) file. This should be (almost?) equivalent to running ``noweb2lyx foo.tex foo.lyx''. This option requires the -c option.

-o

Output directory. With this option, all temporary files and LyX output files (for the given input file, for any included files, or for any file fragments given with the -p option) will be put into outputdir. Otherwise, for each file dir/foo.tex, the temporary files and the LyX output file will be created in dir. This can be useful if a file includes files from other directories which you want to consolidate in one directory, or if you don't have write permission on the directory the LaTeX files are in.

-p

Partial file. The input files are LaTeX fragments, with no preamble matter or \begin{document} commands. This option requires the -c option, since there are no \documentclass commands in the files tex2lyx is translating. When using this option, you can translate more than one file, as long as all files are the same class. The LyX file created by tex2lyx can be included in an existing LyX file using the ``Include LyX File'' command from LyX's Insert menu.

-r

Regular environments (see the section on Syntax Files). If you give more than one environment, separate them with commas (not spaces). You'll probably need to quote the environment list, especially if it has asterisk environments (foo*) in it. If you use this command often, considering creating a personal syntax file.

-s

Syntax files. Input (one or more quoted, comma-separated) syntax files to read in addition to the default. (see the section on Syntax Files for details).

Suffixes .tex, .ltx and .latex are supported. If inputfile does not exist and does not have one of these suffixes, tex2lyx will try to translate inputfile.tex. (This is similar to the behavior of LaTeX.)

The purpose of tex2lyx is to translate well-behaved LaTeX2e into LyX. If your LaTeX file doesn't compile---or if you do weird things, like redefining standard LaTex commands---it may choke. LaTeX209 will often be translated correctly, but it's not guaranteed.

tex2lyx has some bugs and lacks a few features. However, its main goals are:

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Get through a well-behaved LaTeX2e file without crashing

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Translate a lot of that file.

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Localize the parts that can't be translated and copy them in TeX mode

It achieves these main goals pretty well on most files.

There are many improvements that can and will be made to tex2lyx in the future. However, we wanted to get tex2lyx out there early on, to make it easier for new LyX users to read in their existing LaTeX files.

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Run tex2lyx.

tex2lyx will inform you of its progress and give any warnings to stderr, so if you don't want any output at all, try (in csh) `tex2lyx foo.tex >& /dev/null'. You should NOT redirect standard output to foo.lyx.

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Run LyX (version 0.12 or 1.0 or later) on the resulting .lyx file.

In theory, most of the file will have been translated, and anything that's untranslatable will be highlighted in red (TeX mode). In theory, LyX will be able to read in the file, and to create printed documents from it, because all that untranslated red stuff will be passed directly back to LaTeX, which LyX uses as a backend. Unfortunately, reality doesn't always reflect theory. If tex2lyx crashes, or LyX cannot read the generated LyX file, see the BUGS entry elsewhere in this document or the BUGS file.

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Change things that are highlighted in red (TeX mode) by hand in LyX.

As mentioned above, you should be able to print out the LyX file even without doing this. However, changing a command in TeX mode to the corresponding LyX object will allow you to take advantage of LyX's WYSIWYM editing.

tex2lyx is not guaranteed to create a LyX file which generates exactly the same output as the LaTeX file, but it should come close. relyX will generally err on the side of translating less to ensure that dvi or ps files are accurate, even though this leads to more ``evil red text'' and less WYSIWYM.

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PROOFREAD THE DOCUMENT!!

I'm sure you were planning on doing this anyway, but it's particularly important after translating a LaTeX document. tex2lyx is, at least now, better at ``macro-translating'' (translating the whole document) than ``micro-translating'' (translating every little detail). For example, you may see extra spaces or deleted spaces. Space handling has improved, but it's not perfect.

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regular text, including mini-commands like ~, `', \@, \TeX, as well as accented characters like \'{a}, and the special cases ?` and !`

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title commands like \author, \date,

title commands like \author, \date, \title, \thanks and the abstract environment \title, \thanks and the abstract environment

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heading commands like \section including starred commands (\section*)

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Environments: quote, quotation, and verse; center, flushright, and flushleft

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itemize, enumerate, and description environments, and their \item commands. Also, well-behaved nested lists

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cross-referencing commands: \ref, \pageref, \label, and \cite

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\footnote and \margin

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font-changing commands including \em, \emph, \textit, and corresponding commands to change family, size, series, and shape

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\input{foo} (or \input{foo.blah}) and \include{foo}. Plain TeX \input command ``\input foo.tex'' is also supported.

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tabular environment, and commands that go inside it like \hline, \cline, and \multicolumn (but see below)

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float environments table and table*, as well as \caption commands within them

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float environments figure and figure*, as well as graphics inclusion commands \epsf, \epsffile, \epsfbox, \epsfxsize, \epsfig, \psfig, and \includegraphics. Both the graphics and graphicx forms of \includegraphics are supported. Note, however, that many figures will not be translatable into LyX. See the section on ``What LyX Can't Handle'' below.

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thebibliography environment and \bibitem command, as well as BibTeX's \bibliography and \bibliographystyle commands

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miscellaneous commands: \hfill, \\, \noindent, \ldots...

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documentclass-specific environments (and some commands) which can be translated to LyX layouts

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arguments to certain untranslatable commands (e.g. \mbox)

Some of this support may not be 100% yet. See below for details

tex2lyx copies math (almost) verbatim from your LaTeX file. Luckily, LyX reads in LaTeX math, so (almost) any math which is supported by LyX should work just fine. A few math commands which are not supported by LyX will be replaced with their equivalents, e.g., \to is converted to \rightarrow. See the section on Syntax Files for more details.

tex2lyx will also copy any preamble commands (i.e., anything before \begin{document}) verbatim, so fancy stuff you've got in your preamble should be conserved in dvi and printed documents, although it will not of course show up in the LyX window. Check Layout->LaTeX Preamble to make sure.

What tex2lyx Can't Handle --- But it's OK

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tabular* tables

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minipages

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spacing commands (\vspace, \pagebreak, \par, ...)

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\centering, \raggedleft, \raggedright

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\verb and verbatim environment. tex2lyx is careful to copy exactly in this case, including comments and whitespace.

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some unknown (e.g., user-defined) environments and commands

tex2lyx copies unknown commands, along with their arguments, verbatim into the LyX file. Also, if it sees a \begin{foo} where it doesn't recognize the ``foo'' environment, it will copy verbatim until it sees \end{foo} (unless you use the -r option). Hopefully, then, most of these unknown commands won't cause tex2lyx to break; they'll merely require you to do some editing once you've loaded the file up in LyX. That should be less painful than editing either the .tex or the .lyx file using a text editor.

What tex2lyx Handles Badly --- aka BUGS

If tex2lyx is choking on something, or LyX can't read it after tex2lyx translates it, the best thing to do is to put \begin{tex2lyxskip} before the offending text, and \end{tex2lyxskip} after it. I call this a ``skip'' block. tex2lyx will copy this block exactly, in TeX mode. Then edit the resulting LyX file, and translate the unknown stuff by hand. The tex2lyxskip environment is magical; the \begin and \end commands will not be put into the LyX file.

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``Exact'' copying of unknown environments and commands isn't quite exact. Specifically, newlines and comments may be lost. This will yield ugly LyX, but in almost all cases the output will be the same. However, certain parts of the file will be copied perfectly, including whitespace and comments. This includes: the LaTeX preamble, verbatim environments and \verb commands, and skip blocks.

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tex2lyx translates only a few options to the \documentclass command. (Specifically 1[012]pt, [letter|legal|executive|a4|a5|b5]paper, [one|two]side, landscape, and [one|two]column.) Other options are placed in the ``options'' field in the Layout->Document popup.

More importantly, tex2lyx doesn't translate \usepackage commands, margin commands, \newcommands, or, in fact, anything else from the preamble. It simply copies them into the LaTeX preamble. If you have margin commands in your preamble, then the LyX file will generate the right margins. However, these margins will override any margins you set in the LyX Layout->Paper popup. So you should remove the options from the preamble (Layout->Latex Preamble) to be safe. The same goes for setting your language with babel, \inputencoding, \pagestyle, etc.

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The foil class has a couple bugs. tex2lyx may do weird things with optional arguments to \foilhead commands. Also, it may handle \begin{dinglist} incorrectly (although the stuff in the environment should translate normally).

Less significant bugs can be found in the BUGS file.

tex2lyx is hopefully rather robust. As mentioned above, it may not translate your file perfectly, but it shouldn't crash. If it does crash---and the problem is not one of those mentioned above or in the BUGS file---see the section on Bug Reports.

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For a number of commands, LyX does not support the optional argument. Examples include \chapter (and other sectioning commands), and \\. tex2lyx will automatically discard the optional arguments with a warning to stdout. LyX also ignores the width argument for the thebibliography environment.

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Centering (or right or left justifying) works on full paragraphs.

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LyX support for tables isn't perfect. For complicated tables, use a ``skip'' block, so that they will be copied in TeX mode.

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The LyX math editor can't handle the AMS-LaTeX math environments align, split, etc. So those environments will be copied in TeX mode. You can change equation* environments to the exactly equivalent displaymath, and then they will be translated correctly.

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Lyx does not support clipping or bounding boxes for included graphics files. Therefore, many graphics inclusion commands will be untranslatable, and copied in TeX mode. In certain cases, you might be able to translate the command by hand within LyX---for example, if you included a bounding box but the bounding box is already in the .eps file.

LyX only allows figures to have sizes in in,cm, or percentages of \textwidth or \textheight (or \columnwidth). tex2lyx will translate from other units, like pt or mm, but it cannot translate other lengths (e.g. if you wanted to scale a figure to size \topmargin for some reason). tex2lyx will copy figures with untranslatable sizes in TeX mode. Again, you might be able to fix that within LyX.

See the TODO file for details.

The above will create a file my/dir/foo.lyx from foo.tex, overwriting if necessary. When it finds a \begin{myenv} ... \end{myenv} block, it will translate the stuff within the block, but copy the \begin and \end commands in TeX mode. Finally, I'm going to keep the temporary files around (they will also be in my/dir/) and output lots of debugging information into the file foo.debug.

tex2lyx -n -c ``literate-article'' foo.tex

The above will change a noweb document into a LyX literate-article document. A user would do this if the noweb document had documentclass article.

Bug reports should be sent to the LyX developers' mailing list. Its address is currently lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org, but you can check the LyX home page, http://www.lyx.org if that bounces. If you are running tex2lyx on a huge file, please do not send all of the output in your bug report. Just include the last ten or twenty lines of output, along with the piece of the LaTeX file it crashed on. Or, even better, attach a small but complete file which causes the same problem as your original file.

Pass 0

Before doing anything, read the syntax file (or files).

Pass 1a

Split preamble (anything before a \begin{document} command) off the rest of the file. It saves the two pieces in separate files. This is necessary because there may be very strange stuff in a preamble. It also ignores anything after the \end{document}, on the assumption that it isn't LaTeX.

Pass 1b

Translate the preamble. Currently, that just means translating the \documentclass command and copying the rest exactly into the LyX preamble.

Once you know what class the document is, read the LyX layout file for that class.

Pass 2

``Clean'' the TeX file, generating slightly stricter LaTeX. This includes:

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Change, e.g., x^2 to the equivalent but clearer x^{2}

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Removing optional arguments that LyX can't handle (e.g., from \chapter)

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Changing {\em foo} to \emph{foo}, etc. This is necessary because LyX always writes out the non-local forms anyway. This should very rarely make a difference.

Pass 3

Translate LaTeX text, commands, and environments to LyX.

Pass 4

Put the two pieces back together, and do some final tweaking, to generate the LyX file

If there are any \input or \include commands, tex2lyx will loop back to the beginning and translate those. It assumes that the included files are the same class as the main file, and that they have no preamble matter. (If you have an \input command in the preamble of a file, the command will be copied exactly into the LaTeX preamble portion of the LyX file, so the included file won't be translated.) So when translating included files, it skips passes 0 and 1.

If tex2lyx doesn't find a file you wanted to include, it will give a warning, but will continue to translate any files it does find.

First, it describes the syntax of each command, that is, how many required arguments and how many optional arguments the command takes. Knowing this makes it easier for tex2lyx to copy (in TeX mode) commands that it doesn't know how to translate. The syntax file simply has a command, followed by braces or brackets describing its arguments in the correct order. For example, a syntax file entry \bibitem[]{} means that the \bibitem command takes an optional argument followed by a required one, while the entry \bf means that the \bf command takes no arguments at all. When tex2lyx encounters a token that it doesn't know how to translate into LyX, it will copy the token---along with the correct number of arguments---exactly. If the token is not in the syntax file, then tex2lyx just copies as many arguments as it finds. This means that it may copy too much. But since the user can specify additional syntax files, that shouldn't happen often.

Some commands that cannot be translated to LyX, like \mbox, have as one of their arguments regular LaTeX text. If the string ``translate'' is put into an argument of an (untranslatable) command in the syntax file, then tex2lyx will translate that argument instead of copying it verbatim. So, for example, the default syntax file has \raisebox{}[][]{translate}. This means that the \raisebox command and the first argument (and optional arguments if they exist) are copied in TeX mode, but the last argument (which may contain math, complicated LaTeX, other untranslatable commands, etc.) will be translated into LyX. You can't use ``translate'' on optional arguments.

User-defined syntax files are allowed to define new commands and their syntax, or override the number of arguments for a command given in the default syntax file. (E.g., if you're using a style that gives an extra argument to some command...) However, this will only be useful for commands copied in TeX mode. Commands which are actually translated by tex2lyx (like \item) have their argument syntax hard-coded. The hard-coded commands are identified in the default syntax file.

Second, the syntax file describes any ``regular environments''. Usually, an entire unknown environment will be copied in TeX mode. If you define a regular environment ``foo'', though, then only the \begin{foo} and \end{foo} commands will be copied in TeX mode; the text within the environment will be treated (i.e., translated) by tex2lyx as regular LaTeX, rather than being copied into TeX mode. Don't try to declare ``tabbing'' and ``picture'' as regular environments, as the text within those environments will confuse tex2lyx; use this capability for new environments you create that have plain text or math or simple commands in them. You also can't declare unknown math environments (like equation*) as regular environments, either, since the LyX math editor won't understand them. The names of regular environments appear, whitespace-separated, between \begin{tex2lyxre} and \end{tex2lyxre} statements in the syntax file. (If you have a regular environment which you won't use very often, you can use the -r option rather than writing a syntax file.)

When it's finished, tex2lyx will tell you if it finished successfully or died due to some error.

If you import foo.tex to create foo.lyx, then edit foo.lyx and want to re-export it, note that it will overwrite the original foo.tex. (LyX will ask you if you want to overwrite it.)

If you have the \use_tempdir variable set to false in your lyxrc, then LyX will create its temporary files in your current directory, which means your LaTeX original may be overwritten (without a warning from LyX) when you ``view dvi'' or print the LyX document.

MY_LYXDIR/layouts/*.layout

User's personal layout files for document classes

MY_LYXDIR/syntax.default

User's personal syntax file

LIBDIR/layouts/*.layout

System-wide layout files for document classes

LIBDIR/lib/syntax.default

System-wide LaTeX syntax file

LIBDIR is the system-wide LyX directory, usually something like /usr/local/share/lyx/. MY_LYXDIR is your personal LyX directory, something like .lyx/ in your home directory.

Code contributors:

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John Weiss wrote the original CleanTeX pass.

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Etienne Grossmann

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Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos

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David Suarez de Lis

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Kayvan Aghaiepour Sylvan added noweb stuff and wrote noweb2lyx

Other contributors:

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Jean-Marc Lasgouttes worked on the wrapper script and offered lots of bug reports, advice, and feature suggestions.

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Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen and Marc Pavese provided advice.

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Various members of the LyX developers' and users' lists provided bug reports and feature suggestions.