I want to make high level comments on 1.0.0pre8. This is long (sorry).
First, my background. I've used latex exactly twice - once for my
resume and the other time for my Master's thesis. I assumed emacs's
latex-mode was as good as it got. I've never used lyx before two days
ago. I use unixen (specifically RedHat 5.2 linux, in English) for
everything.
So, I tried 1.0.0pre8 for the first time. It autoconfigured and
compiled beautifully. It ran beautifully and was intuitive and
simple. It was easy for me to bang out a document, even though I was
totally rusty on latex commands. I loved the ease of displaying dvi
and postscript. I liked the help menu - it was very well integrated,
easy for me to use, and having "Known Bugs" as a pull down menu
adds a lot of credibility to the software. I thought the menu
layout was essentially well chosen, and loved the search and replace
tool. WYSIWYM worked great, and its use of color was brilliant. I
experienced no crashes, and was pleased to discover autosave when I
killed the process. The spell checker was a good bonus.
I noticed some things that might be improved for later versions. By
far the most important thing was screen fonts. My screen fonts didn't
scale nicely to the sizes they were displayed, giving a very blocky
look. I did some adjusting until I got something that looked ok but it
took some fiddling. I'm not a font guy and don't pretend to know the
nature of the configuration issue. I do suggest, that for the
majority of the people who try lyx, that the screen fonts shouldn't
look blocky when lyx is first run. I'm guessing this is something to
be addressed by the linux distributions or in RPMs or something. I
want to emphasize that the first impression is actually a big deal,
and chunkified fonts make a significant (non-positive) first
impression.
Next, lyx menus suffer a bit from the "radically different choices are
right next to each other yet look quite similar" syndrome. For
example, in the File menu, less popular choices like "revert to
saved..." are identically rendered as the more popular choices.
Picking out the common choices requires just a bit too much brain
power. I read that nuclear power plant operators face similar problems
problems when are deciding which lever to push out of a zillion near
identical choices.
I hate to use Microsoft as an example, but their most recent version
of Office addresses this problem by putting a just few small icons
inside the pull down menus, next to the most popular choices. This
makes popular choices easier to pick out from the crowd. I strongly
suspect that this depends on the GUI toolkit (XForms?), but I thought
it was worth mentoning.
I'm glad that the icons are mostly a subdued and unobtrusive grey. I
suppose I'd like to see them highlight with a touch of color when the
mouse moves over them (a.k.a Microsoft Internet Explorer), but again
that's a probably a GUI toolkit thing.
As far as minor quirks, I found it a bit odd that the dialog boxes had
different key binding than the main editing window. Again I
assume this is xforms at work, but it was a bit wierd. My backspace
key was bound differently, and emacs bindings were only enabled in the
dialog boxes. I guess I'm happy everything appears configurable, but
I'd have preferred a more consistant default.
In the users guide, the only oddity I encounted was a paragraph about
hyphenation (- vs. -- vs. ---), that said: "Those of you seeing this
from within lyx will see no difference [...]" I think this could be
worded a bit better, as I could certainly distinguish between -, --,
and ---.
Ok, that's it, have a great 1.0.0 release. Sorry for throwing feedback
at the list days before it goes out the door. I'm totally delighted;
lyx makes latex accessable to me for casual use. I look forward to
using it for years to come.
Jeff
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