hello everybody, I happended to raise this problem in comp.text.tex, and someone asked me (hastily) to post about it in this mailing list, so please don't eat me. :-)
I know this is a secondary feature, because it is not about functionality but about ease of use. Anyway... 1. I believe that the Lyx math-panel should have tooltips. More precisely, when you position the mouse pointer above some button, a "tooltip" should appear (possibly on the status bar, in case it is easier to program) showing the Latex escape sequences needed to write the same symbol by hand. This way, it won't be needed to read Latex manuals anymore, in order to learn keyboard shortcuts. You'll pass from mouse clicking to keyboard without any effort and without "study". IMO, this is a very important feature. If you know Mathtype 4 or 5 (it is an add-on for MS Word), you know what I mean. In other words: having a good manual is surely a good thing for Lyx; but having NO manuals at all would be even better, if you know what I mean. (I know by experience that many linux users hate this kind of reasoning, but I can't see why) 2. Another thing that I found lacking is: a wizard. For the same reason. Let us admit it, not many users (surely not in the windows world :-P) are willing to read manuals before using a program. I believe a complete program should "teach itself" to the user. This is not at all difficult to achieve. All we would need is a button "what do you want to do?", always on the foreground and well visible. you must click this button whenever you don't know how to do something. As soon as you click it, a dialog box appears whith other buttons, and so on. You begin traversing a hierchical tree where you can locate the exact thing you want to do. For example, these hierarchical levels could be something like: ----- 1. What do you want to do? ------- 1.1. Change something about the way Lyx works 1.2. Change something about the looks of your document look. 1.3. I want to know something. ---- 1.3.1. I want to know something about fonts. ... ------- 1.3.1.1. I want to know why my fonts look jagged. ... ------ 1.2.1. Change something about how your document appears under Lyx. 1.2.2. Change something about how your document appears when printed. ------- This would be an enormous amount of work, because it should totally cover anything you can do with the current menu, anything you can read on the manuals. And if the user asks for something which is out of Lyx's AIM (such as inserting a border or shading around a paragraphs), this wizard should tell the user "lyx is not a typesetting program". Once again, I understand that these are minor features compared to functionality. Of course, who already knows Lyx would never use the wizard, but it is not intended for us. Let me know what you think, Maurizio
