Use fancyhdr in Lyx to position page number

Question

I am trying to customise the position of the page number to make them all appear at the bottom centre in Lyx. I plan to use the fancyhdr package in the preamble section of the document, but I get the following error msg:

'LaTex Error: Command /footruleskip already defined'

I guess it has something to do with me forcing a footnote formatting which may already be defined by fancyhdr package, as i have the following in my preamble:

\setlength{\skip\footins}{0.8cm}

Any suggestion how I get around this problem and set the page number position together with the footnote setting? Many thanks.

Answer 1

This link should help: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Page_Layout#Customising_with_fancyhdr. You can use the lhead, chead, rhead, lfoot, cfoot and rfoot commands to tell it what you what where (section names, page numbers, custom text, etc). I think you still need to specify them even if they are empty. For only a page number at the bottom center, that would be:

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt}
\lhead{}
\chead{}
\rhead{}
\lfoot{}
\cfoot{\thepage}
\rfoot{}

Perhaps your error could be fixed by using \renewcommand instead of trying to define an already existing value.

Answer 2

I'm trying to do my thesis with LyX and small problems like this are killing me because of having to adhere to the strict format of my school. Anyhow, this page came up as I searched for over an hour for the answer to your question. I'm using the memoir layout (kind of, I've already had to edit it) because my school's latex .cls file is supposedly based on memoir.cls (which I couldn't get to work correctly with LyX despite hours of persistence). I ended up putting this code into my preamble and it displayed the page numbers in the bottom-center per my formatting requirements.

\makeevenfoot{headings}{}{\thepage}{}
\makeoddfoot{headings}{}{\thepage}{}
\makeevenhead{headings}{}{}{}
\makeoddhead{headings}{}{}{}

Hope this helps anyone else that finds this page. Now if I can just figure out how to tell LyX that I have no chapters and I want sections to be 1 instead of 0.1. I'll probably just use section* and call my sections "Section" #. Anyway, I hope this helps someone who is as close to punching themselves in the face for using LyX as I am.