(moving to lyx-devel, and sorry for the longish subject line)

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Guenter Milde <[email protected]> wrote:
> My idea for a better beamer support in LyX would be a layout where frames
> are represented by custom insets rather than paragraph styles. This would
> make the "lyxframe" hack obsolete.
>
I also toyed with the idea when coming up with the
beamer-fragile.module [1] (for including Sweave code in Beamer
presentations). From what I see it shouldn't be difficult to get rid
of the "lyxframe" hack for regular frames, and replace it with custom
insets.

However I find several usability issues with the insets arrangement:
- custom insets are more difficult to insert (access Insert > Custom
Insets > "Inset") than styles (combo box on the main toolbar). Maybe
we need a combo for custom insets, too?!

- currently inserting a new frame in Beamer automatically inserts the
'frame title', too (sorry for the bad wording). With the insets
arrangement, one would need to Insert > Custom Insets > "Frame" then
Main Toolbar > Style Combo > "Frame Title". When using insets, we
would be better off if we found a way to automatically insert both via
the same action (perhaps using the 'command-sequence' lfun).

- flex insets don't support optional arguments via the misnamed Short
Title, so "hard-coded" insets will be needed for 'plain', 'fragile',
'fragile, allowframebreaks', etc. frames. To be fair, currently this
is also the case.

[1] http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/7273#comment:13


> I have implemented the concept for the seminar layout, see
> http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/7624
>
The above-mentioned issues aside (which seem to me easy to work
around), using insets would certainly clean up our support for Beamer
both visually (the way the doc looks on the screen) and code-wise (the
way the LaTeX code is produced). At least I like what I see in the new
seminar.layout. It would also address part of one of our GSoC
projects, namely the 'LyX presentation mode' [2]: using insets should
ease up the future implementation of a presentation mode.

Regards
Liviu

[2] http://wiki.lyx.org/Devel/SummerOfCode2011Ideas#toc3

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