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A fair amount of my homework is of the form: prove some statement then paste in a bunch of graphs verifying it experimentally.

LyX makes me save images I paste in, which is really annoying when I just want to copy them over. (e.g. in Word you would just paste it in, you don't have to save the image separately.) Is there a preference somewhere that I can say that I don't want it to ask me where to save all my images? (i.e. can I specify some default image directory?)

EDIT: To be more clear, what I want is some way to tell Lyx: when I paste an image, just save it in this directory without popping up a dialog and asking me where to put it.

Xodarap
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  • Can't you just insert an external graphic and select the file location on disk? – Will Robertson Nov 16 '10 at 23:11
  • @Will: Yeah, I don't like selecting the location every time. (My question is whether Lyx can select it automagically for me instead.) It sounds trivial, but when you do it over and over again... – Xodarap Nov 17 '10 at 00:28

1 Answers1

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Yes, sort of. If you don't mind the images cluttering up the directory where the LyX document is saved, then you can just save the image "foo.jpeg" in the same folder as the bar.lyx file and in the image box just enter "foo.jpeg".

IIRC Windows by default makes this horrendously long path to the file when you "browse" for the image. I usually delete those long paths, put all my images in (say) an /img subdirectory of where the bar.lyx file is, then in the figure float put simply img/foo.jpeg. This is really handy for moving around several computers.

I am afraid you can't just copy-paste pictures in to the .lyx file, unfortunately. For some software (R, for example) there are utilities (Sweave, for example) where a person doesn't actually insert the picture, rather, (s)he inserts code to generate the picture. It's the best way, if the external application supports it.

G. Jay Kerns
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  • So there's no way to skip the "browse for where to save it" step? – Xodarap Nov 17 '10 at 16:35
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    Yes, just type img/foo.jpg in the little box. Since we don't care about the long path, we don't need to browse. But you still need to save the image externally somewhere in a place that you know (hopefully close by) with a name that you can remember. – G. Jay Kerns Nov 18 '10 at 12:50