LyX sync document settings of child documents with master especially concerning citation style

Question

How can I make sure, that the document settings of a child document are compatible to the master document?

Today I had a big hassle concerning citation:

If I choose "citation style standard (numerical)" in the master document and "natbib" in the child document I get in the "insert citation window" (in the child document) the options that belong to natbib package (citet, citep, citeauthor etc.). Trying to render the document gives an error: "control sequence undefinded" (obviously, as the \citet is only defined in the natbib package, which I haven't included (in the master, at least)).

Do I have to keep master and child settings in sync manually? Shouldn't the be possible to be done automatically or are there use cases where different settings are useful? I expect a behaviour just like LaTeX, where it is also possible to have subdocuments without any header.

This problem: LyX BibTeX with child-documents not working was obviously caused by the same issue.

Answer 1

This might answer your question probably only partly: I have a master document with some child documents. All lyx files have the same document type and use the defaults. To include packages or define macros I have an additional tex file (options.tex) which contains everything that needs to be done in the preamble.

In the preamble of the lyx documents I add an input instruction.

\input{options}

This solution is not perfect, but this enables me to compile the master document (which takes some time as it is 190+ pages) or compile only a child document.

Answer 2

Currently the only option seems to be manually synchronizing the settings, which is error prone. In order to reduce errors, the most reliable workflow I found is:

• Change settings of the parent document.
• Close LyX
• Open the parent document as plaintext document (e.g. with Emacs) and copy the part starting with \begin_header and ending with \end_header.
• For each child document:
  • Open child document as plain text
  • Overwrite the header with the parent document header.

I have written a script though for automating this process, lyx-header-util.py [gist.github.com] (requires python 3), which reduces the workflow to

• For each child document run

  lyx-header-util.py copyheaderinplace PARENTFILE.LYX CHILDDOCUMENT.lyx
  

(backup recommended before doing this; The script overwrites the original files).