Am 22.03.2010 18:36, schrieb Steve Litt:
On Monday 22 March 2010 08:51:55 Walter van Holst wrote:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: things that I miss in lyx
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0100
From: Walter van Holst<walter.van.ho...@xs4all.nl>
To: Jose Quesada<ques...@gmail.com>
On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesada<ques...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...
1. incremental search
2. sentence autocapitalization
As others have written, NO! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY, DON'T!
++
3. grammar check (not crucial)
[clip]
4. search highlight occurences
[clip]
7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't
(clipboard
integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)
Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
take
care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo
camper. Which I am not.
+=65535
What could be grosser than having the source's fingerpainting auto-inserted in
your styles-based LyX doc?
I'd like to take a second to back up a couple levels of abstraction, from
features to priorities. My priorities in LyX are:
* Ability to write long documents fast and easily
* Styles based authoring
Believe it or not, aesthetic typesetting isn't one of my priorities. My books
written in WordPerfect 5.1 and MS Word were easily good enough when it came to
typesetting. After all, my books are a mail order product.
If I wanted to write short docs I'd use Abiword or OpenOffice, kompozer or
Vim. If I didn't care about styles based authoring I'd use OpenOffice.
I think priorities determine the need for features. Given my priorities,
character styles was far and away the best feature addition in the last 10
years. Another great feature is LyX's ability to almost instantly manipulate
100,000 word documents -- good algorithms implemented right. Outline view was
a good addition and will be even better when it can be used to add nodes.
Outline view is a big timesaver. I imagine Layout Modules would be a big
timesaver but haven't learned to use them yet.
One of the biggest consumers of time when I use LyX is adding and tweaking
styles, both paragraph (environments) and character. Getting a LyX style to do
what you want is about 2 orders of magnitude more time consuming than the same
thing in WP 5.1 or MS Word. That would probably go up to an order of magnitude
of 3 for a LyX newbie. This can't be helped -- LaTeX is more complex and less
obvious than WP5.1 or MSWord layout, but it can be addressed through a
combination of:
1) Documentation
2) Easy to browse and search repository of styles to which we all contribute
Sentence autocapitalization might be somewhat of a time saver if the subject
matter always has a capital following a period and whitespace. But for code-
rich docs, it would slow you down immensely. As far as special kinds of
searches, LyX's algorithm design and implementation is so good that you can
brute force search almost instantly, so what's the need?
This paragraph is my opinion -- your mileage may vary. In my opinion LyX is a
tool to be used in a very narrow set of circumstances -- long document writing
where consistency is a priority (hence styles), and good typesetting is a
priority, and table of contents and indices just work. I'd never use it for a
poster -- Inkscape does posters better. I'd never use it to create a web page
-- Kompozer is much better at that (exception: When a whole web subsite must
have consistency and is the equivalent of a document). I wouldn't use it for a
five page document -- OpenOffice and AbiWord are much easier for that, whether
you're doing fingerpainting or limited styles-based. To me, adding features
like autocap and especially rich/XML paste would be trying to make LyX into a
tool it's not -- like putting a file on the side of a hammer.
I would like to present my experiences which are somewhat different from
Steve's:
I'm using LyX for *all* sorts of documents, preferably rather short ones
5 - 10 pages. For me the consistency of a large set of shorter documents
is the crucial point (may be around 150 different papres which have
accumulated over the years)
So I have spent some time in defining my special layouts for e.g.
official documents for my business as management consultant, different
letter templates for my bussiness, private letter, private letters of my
wife and so on.
I have to admit that I have some knowledge of LaTeX from past activities.
And once I have a template for some type of document I don't have to
think about layout any more.
I have been obliged to use word for several years and had two
opportunities to migrate a set of documents with a specific company
layout to a new word version (not to speak about the joy to buy and
install a new printer ;-)
I'm very happy and extremly content to use LyX
Cheers
Hellmut
--
Dr. Hellmut Weber m...@hellmutweber.de
Degenfeldstraße 2 tel +49-89-3081172
D-80803 München-Schwabing mobil +49-172-8450321
please: No DOCs, no PPTs. why: tinyurl.com/cbgq
