> 
> Like what?
> 
ok, I'll make a list of all the things I've found myself wanting. To
start off with, I'll say this:

I've been using Lyx to compile a 20,000+ word design document for an
electronic game. It's been pretty cool, but the large document size has
(i believe) stressed some of the components of lyx a little.

Things *I* would like to see:

1.- An integration of most of the "tips and tricks" listed on the
website. Since someone has gone to the trouble of listing them,. they
must be being used. therefore, why not include them in the lyx program,
rather than have your users scurry around trying to hash together
something? An example is the glossary. At the moment there seem to be
two ways to get a  glossary going: The first is to export to text, grep
for all the capitalised words, and then make your own glossary yourself.
Not only is this approach kludgey and time wasting, what happens if you
have words which are NOT capitalised, but which you still want to
include? searching through a 20,000 word document is not the answer i
think. The other solution is to use the makeindex latex package. The
trouble with this is that it forces the user to know about latex, which
i don't. I'm pretty good with computers, and have done a bit of
programming before, and have even *looked* at latex before, but making
users learn latex in order to get a glossary going is a bit much i feel.
Why not build the makeindex package into lyx, and have it done
automatically? making a glossary is very similar to making a table of
contents, and lyx seems to handle that just fine..

2.- Not really sure about this one, but isn't it possible to do
hyperlinks in PDF? why not have it so that lyx creates these hyperlinks
when exporting documents to either HTML or PDF? The links should be
footnotes and the chapter headings (as in: chapters link to the chapter
headings in the document, so users can click in the table of contents
and be sent to the correct part in the body of the document).

3.- Spellchecker. A "replace all" button would be nice. Also, I've
noticed that LyX doesn't use the proper (aspell) dictionaries on my
Debian Sid box, even after playing with it for a good hour or so.

4.- Table sorting. I've brought this up here before, but I may as well
do it again. I feel that this feature is vital. I have (in my document)
tables with 300+ rows, and i have to be able to sort them. AT the moment
I'm copying them to a text file, and sorting them with a python script,
and then pasting them back into lyx. As i said before, this is pretty
silly...

5.- Users *should* be able to fine tune *all* the details about the
typesetting. Boxing users in so they can only use what *you* think is
good type setting is (IMHO) plain silly. I personally can't find any
styles in the pretty small style list which exactly matches the style i
need. I should be able to set everything, like the whitespace above and
below titles, whether chapters/sections/subsections start on a new page,
whether tables are set out on a seperate page, and a whole lot more.
Again, forcing users to use *your* style of typesetting just makes users
unhappy with the results.

6.- Also, I have never been able to get the QT frontend to compile with
lyx. I'm using the very latest QT libraries, and update my system
regurally, but still i run into errors. Most of the time it's "can't
find QT libraries", even though I've specified where the libraries are.
Is this me? or lyx? either way, perhaps some documentation in the source
package should say what the magic trick is to get this going.

7.- I'm sure there was something else as well, but i can't remember it
right now...


I realise that people get very defencive about software they have worked
on, and I really don't mean to cause any offence, but 1,4&5 are pretty
vital features to me. What do you guys think? AFAIK they should all be
able to be added without too much work (not that I've actually looked at
the code myself, i don't have the experience, or the know-how).

Well, i hope something good comes of this ;)

Thanks for listening/reading,
Thomi.

-- 

Thomi Richards,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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