Hi, Dr Dave wrote: > My first "bad experience" with Lyx was the inability to display matching > "double quotes", as the colloquial jargon calls them. You can see on the > attached IMG01 that a different character is being used for the opening and > closing quotation symbols; really, I would not expect to see such a faux > pas in either the document or the Lyx application at less than five minutes > out-of-the-box.
Did you actually check the output (by View->PDF)? You will see that the correct quotes for English typesetting are used. And of course opening and closing quotation marks are different characters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark > In addition, for whatever reason, I see inconsistent indentation behavior > for Standard style. For example, the first Standard paragraph following a > Subsection is flush-left, but each subsequent Standard paragraph is > indented 5 spaces. What kind of style convention is that? Robert Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style, sec. 2.3, and I'm sure all well-known English style guides. Feel free to quote a counter example. > How can a "set > style" possibly be allowed to have two different behaviors? To quote Bringhurst: "The function of a paragraph indent is to mark a pause, setting the paragraph apart from what precedes it. If a paragraph is preceded by a title or subhead, the indent is superfluous and can therefore be ommitted, as it is here [throughout Bringhurst's book]" > And, how about missing characters (or maybe it is a character that should > be removed)? I see a closing parenthesis with no opening parenthesis. Take > a look at Section 2 Navigating the Document, second paragraph, the last > character. A typo. Thanks for pointing that out. > Also, I found it rather odd to have footnotes marked with red text "foot" > on a grey background. I rather would have expected to see numerals, or at > least a numeral along with the text. I can see the utility if the document > is intended for electronic viewing and navigation, but not if it is to be > printed. I suspect that at print time the footnote references are converted > to numerals; I did not check that at this point. Do this. Check the printout. (btw. the next version will display numbers also in LyX's workarea). > Now that these initial formatting problems are addressed, let's have a look > at the actual content. Obviously, this is directed to "casual" users of > word processors other than Lyx. I say that because, I suspect that many of > you well-know, Word, as well as other packages, have templates and styles > for the user to apply to a document in a manner very similar to that as > classes and styles in Lyx. You try to make the case of the user applying > character-based manual formatting to a document, I suspect because that is > indeed what an *untrained* user tends to do. But, as the Lyx documentation > makes clear, *training *is a must for using Lyx. I suspect that if a new > user of MS Word had the same number of hours of training in how to apply > the default styles that are avaliable in the default template in MS Word, > there would be little, if any, difference in user satisfaction or results > between the new Lyx user and the new Word user. No. LyX uses LaTeX, and thus the typographic quality will always be better than Word's. LaTeX has a far better (paragraph based) hyphenation algorithm, much better kerning and it can deal with microtypographic features (such as character protusion and font expansion), just to name a few. And of course it's free, while MS Word costs some hundred bucks. Regards, Jürgen
