Monday, October 29, 2018

Pseudocode in LyX

Fair warning: This post is for LyX users only. When I'm writing a paper or presentation in LaTeX (using LyX, of course) and want to include a program chunk or algorithm in pseudocode, I favor the algorithmicx package (and specifically the algpseudocode style). There being no intrinsic support for the package in LyX, I have to enter the various commands as raw LaTeX (or, in LyX parlance, "ERT" -- "Evil Red Text", so named for historical reasons). Unfortunately, I do this seldom enough that I do not remember said commands, so each sojourn into pseudocode involves finding and opening the documentation file for algorithmicx.

I finally decided to fix that by writing a pseudocode module for LyX. The beta version (which seems pretty stable to me) is available under a GPLv2 license from my Github repository. Besides a "gitignore" file (which you should, as the name suggests, ignore), there is the module file and a combination user guide/demonstration LyX document. Installation instructions are included in the latter. You will, of course, need to install the algorithmicx package before using the module.

Should you decide to try it, there's an issue tracker in the repository where you can report bugs or feature requests. I hope someone else can get some use out of this, but even if not, the development time will pay itself back the next time I need to write some pseudocode.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Due to intermittent spamming, comments are being moderated. If this is your first time commenting on the blog, please read the Ground Rules for Comments. In particular, if you want to ask an operations research-related question not relevant to this post, consider asking it on Operations Research Stack Exchange.