Hi,
just a comment on the User guide's Introduction. There is this text there:
This gives you far more power than you may think. No longer do you need
to scroll through a 75 page document, changing all of the section
numbers because you deleted an old section. You could even pick a
section, heading and all, up out of one document and drop it in a new
one. LyX does the renumbering for you, adds the section to the Table of
Contents, and more! Because you tell LyX [and LaTeX] what kind of
document you're editing and what type of paragraph this-or-that text is,
the computer can typeset it accordingly. Cut some paragraphs from an old
document [say, an article] and paste them in a completely different one,
[say, a letter] and LyX does the rest. Of course you can also still do
some low-level formatting for fine-tuning. However, the proper way with
LyX is to tell the computer what the text is, not what it should look
like. So, we like to say that LyX gives you WYSIWYM editing [What You
See Is What You Mean].
I certainly know, that most of the users of _other_ wordprocessors
doesn't know about anything about styles, headlines numbering, etc.
However, it is certainly not the fault of these wordprocessors (well,
sort of, but not that these programs were not able to do it). It seems
to me, that author of User Guide made WYSIWYG wordprocessors even more
dull than they are. If you ever "changed all of the section numbers
because you deleted an old section" in these wordprocessors, than you
certainly never read any manual to them (OK, unless you had M$ Works,
but it is certainly not the program we want to be measured with, isn't
it?). And so on.
I think, that the miracle of WYSIWYM authoring is somewhere else --
strict separation of presentation from content (which should be our
battlecry too) makes authoring more easy, more usable on different
platforms (I mean on printer, screen, etc.), etc. You name it. But easy
of headlines renumbering is certainly too low-shot for LyX.
What do you think about it?
Matej
