On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 12:16 PM, José Matos <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Friday 10 July 2015 11:28:53 Liviu Andronic wrote:
>> Absolutely, yet our naming is so terse so as to prove confusing. Maybe
>> we need a tooltip there, or a status message appearing when hovering
>> the item, or something else. Otherwise people simply won't really know
>> what that item is supposed to do, or worse assume that LyX is unable
>> to do this at all (when it does!). I know RTFM would be one way to
>> approach this, but maybe there is something we can do to ease
>> confusion... Say, and yet another shot in the dark: "Include Child
>> Document (.tex, .lyx, etc.)"
>
> FWIW I agree with you. :-)
> "Child Document" and "External Material" differ only on the implementation.
>
> Note also that even in terms of documentation in section 7 (External Document 
> Parts) of the "LyX's detailed Figure, Table, Floats, Notes, Boxes and 
> External Material manual" it says:
>
> "With the menu Insert->File you can insert external material into your 
> document. This can be:
>
>   LyX Document - Another LyX document; its content is directly inserted to 
> your document.
>
>   Plain Text - A text document; each line is inserted in your document as a 
> separate paragraph.
>
>   Plain Text, Join Lines - A text document; text lines are inserted in your 
> document continuously but an empty text line creates a new paragraph.
>
>   External Material - Files in various formats.
>
>   Child Document - LyX or LaTeX-documents."
>
> This is funny because basically it says that External Material is a 
> particular case of external material. :-)
>

What's more, I find it confusing that you can insert "LyX Document",
and then insert "Child LyX Document". Maybe we oughta make it very
clear in the menu when we *insert* stuff and when we *include*
(external) stuff.

A merging of some kind of "External Material" and "Child Document"
might also make sense, as you suggest above.


> And just like what you said refers child document just for .lyx or .tex 
> files, exactly what you have proposed. :-)
>


> Date is a striking example since there is no file to be inserted. :-)
>
In truth, I never understood what it was, how it worked, or why it was
there in the first place. :)

Regards,
Liviu


> I agree with the non-discoverability of this. I have to search for it if I do 
> not use this feature for some time.
>
> It would be probably easier if the options were packaged together in terms of 
> functionality and not of implementation. For example for listings I can 
> imagine to use an external program (like src-highlite from gnu) that takes 
> care of the program representation and exports to several formats instead of 
> just using listings.
>
> If we were to add this option as an external material then similar 
> functionality would shown apart depending just on the implementation used.
>
>> Cheers,
>> Liviu
>
> --
> José Abílio



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