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..
It would be nice, but I don't know if it should be a priority.
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).
This is answered later in the thread. It might be worth having it as a default, but you know how it is with default packages - put one in, and someone will write to the list complaining "why is this useless feature enabled by default."
3.- Spellchecker. A "replace all" button would be nice.
It would not, IMHO. I have rceived student essays on Plato where every instance of the philosopher's name was spelt "plateau", not to mention a paper on the famous political philosopher "Thomas Hobbies". OK, these were problems between chair and keyboard, but I still feel that "replace all" is for editing programs, not text documents. Though I suppose in a case like yours, where you're dealing with very long texts, it would be useful.
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...
That would be nice, I agree. For anything requiring lots of data to format, I tend to use OpenOffice (particularly because it has reasonably good integration with spreadsheets and databases). I imagine that for the mathematicians and scientists who make up the hardcore of LaTeX users, ability to do more with table data would be even more useful.
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.
The use of "your" here is misleading. The LyX developers do not set the paragraph environments, they come from whoever writes the LaTeX styles. A style editor would be a nice feature, but it would also be a lot of work.
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.
There were a lot of posts on this issue some time back (I remember, I was one of the people asking questions!). Have a hunt through the archives.
7.- I'm sure there was something else as well, but i can't remember it right now...
Implementing character styles has been mentioned a few times, as has replacing the "hardwired" font selection with something more flexible, based on what fonts are actually installed in LaTeX. I've also mentioned that using the OpenOffice Word filter would be nice, but again that's a major project, since AFAIK it is not available as a standalone application like wv.
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).
Some of them could be implemented without too much trouble; others, I think, would be require a lot of work. Some may not even be practical at all; for example, allowing users to fine tune *all* aspects of formatting really means being a front-end to TeX rather than LaTeX. It could be done, but you would then have a different program altogether, perhaps. I use LyX for most of my writing because it relieves me of the fine-tuning, and I'm fortunate enough to want to produce the kind of documents that LaTeX is designed to produce. When I need to fiddle with the details of physical (as opposed to logical) layout, I use OpenOffice. They are both valid ways of doing things, but I'm not sure how good it is to try and mix them.
BTW, I'm sure that if a benevolent millionaire were to pay a team of LyX developers to implement every feature request anyone has come up with here or on Bugzilla, someone would write in to complain about LyX being bloated and say there is a need for a lightweight front-end to LaTeX ;-)
Robin
-- "Some guy breaking into a government computer system and wreaking havoc makes for a more interesting movie plot than some guy writing device drivers. It's hard to work in a good 10-minutes car chase scene with some guy who writes device drivers..." - tjc, post to LWN
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
