On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 01:00:28AM +0300, Stanislav Malyshev wrote: [snip] > > Well, here's a problem. I *hate* when some dumb program tries to tell me > what my whitespaces should be. It may give me the tools to do the right > (from its POV) thing, but it should always give me enough rope. That's > what I despise windows systems for - they are made to protect the user > from himself, and I positively hate systems with this design. Must be > something personal.
In addition to Dan's reply, 1. LaTeX (and therefore LyX) is not a random dumb program. It was designed and written after consulting some of the best publishers in the world, who know how to design a book. It certainly does that much better than the average msword user (but maybe not the average Linux user?). 2. It won't let you simply press SPACE or ENTER, but it does give you "enough rope", IMHO. Ctrl-Space inserts a "hard space", and under Layout->Paragraph you can set the distance before or after the current paragraph (in much finer control than ENTER, BTW - not only whole lines). Certainly sounds good enough for me (but I rarely have to use any wordprocessor, so I do not really count). 3. I generally agree with you about programs that think they are smarter than the user. I do not think this is the case. LaTeX (and LyX) is both smarter than the average user, and give you more (not less) control over the output. The problem (for most users) is that going out of its default behaviour is unintuitive and hard. One might argue whether that was a result of the laziness of the programmers, or a design feature, but that's it. 4. For an example of a real book written in Hebrew under LyX, see <http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~stoledo/osbook>. Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
