Hello Julia Thank you for the feedback. Learning LyX (and LaTeX) involves a rather steep learning curve, which at times can seem quite daunting. I am not part of the docs team, but I can give you some pointers. See below.
On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Julia Schäfer <[email protected]> wrote: > It would be GREAT to have shorter, clearer Manuals > A lot of love has gone into our manuals. If there are specific points that were unclear or improperly explained, it would be great if you could provide us with exact pointers. As for "shorter" manuals, there is a trade-off: either you write long and exhaustive manuals that are difficult to parse but allows one to find instructions on very specific issues; or you write short manuals that contain trivial overview documentation that may not help you with any specific problem. We are trying to provide both. This is why we have split documentation into several documents of increasing difficulty. Introduction and Tutorial for (absolute) beginners. User's Guide provides a more systematic list of the features supported by LyX. Additional Features, Embedded Objects and Math focus on more specific features of the LyX environment, although some of these features can be very frequently used depending on your needs. This is completed by the Specific Manuals sub-menu, which---of interest to you, I assume---contains a Linguistics Manual. Another source of documentation is the tutorials on the Wiki. [1] For a quick and gentle introduction to LyX, writing your first document (from writing a thesis perspective) and common beginner pitfalls, see my own LyX Essentials. [2] The Wiki itself contains a lot of miscellaneous tips and tricks, so use its search function when in need. Another place for looking up LaTeX workarounds is Wikibooks [3] and StackExchange [4]. Of course, do not forget your favourite LaTeX manual and preferred search engine. You've already found our mailing lists. [1] http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/Tutorials [2] http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/LyX/tutorials/essentials/LyX_Essentials.pdf [3] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/ [4] http://tex.stackexchange.com/ > and Informations that are a bit easier to navigate. > I am not sure what you mean: The manuals are easy to navigate. When you open a manual (Intro), in LyX do Document > Outline which will pop-up the outliner for you. Use it to get an overview of the document and quickly jump sections. Alternatively compile the document using View > View PDF (pdflatex) and use your PDF viewer's integrated Index or Outline feature. In both LyX and most PDF viewers you can easily search for any given keyword. > That is: important informations should be easier to find and not be mixed > with uimportant stuff. Its > LaTeX is a complex beast: How can we guess what is important to one user but not to another one. If you are interested in Linguistics you are likely to skip the Math manual. And vice-versa. And LaTeX is littered with specific use-cases, which is why the documentation is so fragmented. Regards Liviu
