Q:

Small editing issues in LyX document

I'm editing a LyX document and am struggling with a few issues:

I would like to include an abstract but suppresses the word "Abstract" above the abstract.
The title sections and "References" are in in default in bold. I can manually change the section titles to not bold, but not the section numbers. Do you know how to unbold these?
I would like to change "References" (in bold) to "REFERENCES" not in bold.
Titles and "References" are by default on the left; I would like to have them centered.

Thank you very much in advanced for enlightening me!
Tompv

A:

1 and 3
In a way, questions 1 and 3 are the same, or they can at least be answered in the same way, which is that described in Translate paragraph environment.
In short, if you're using babel, which I think is the default behaviour, go to Document --> Settings --> LaTeX preamble, and add
\AtBeginDocument{%
  \addto\captionsenglish{%
    \renewcommand\abstractname{}
    \renewcommand\refname{REFERENCES}
}}

If babel is turned off, you need just
\renewcommand\abstractname{}
\renewcommand\refname{REFERENCES}

In either case only the PDF will change, not the view in LyX.
(For the abstract, another way would be to 'cheat' a bit by using Quote instead of Abstract, and reducing the font size to Small.)
2 and 4
Question 2 and 4 are also sort of the same question, they are about formatting \sections. In article (which is the default document class used by LyX), the References-heading is an unnumbered section, so the same formatting applies.
The LaTeX answer can be found in the first part of the answer to \newcommand for centered \section, you just need to remove the \bfseries, as you didn't want them to be bold. To apply this in LyX, again go to Document --> Settings --> LaTeX preamble and add
\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat*{\section}{\centering\normalfont\Large}

