On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 02:34:51PM +0200, j.heidemeier wrote: > O.K I didn't explain it cleary enough. I didn't want to withdraw the existence > of "floating objects" in lyx - I wanted to change the perspective how they > were exposed to the authors - they should stay but they should be viewed as > components of the document. > Your examples I would view as e.g. explanatory insets, which should have the > ability to float around to find the best place to be displayed, not as > floating objects with absolutely different contents. > If I write an article with a table, why should I think in the first step: Will > it be longer than one page? If not I make the 2 steps for inclusion for a > float and a table otherwise I make one step for longtables. In the first case > I can include a caption, in the latter case I can only try to play dirty > tricks. I want to write the table, and at the final layout step I want to > decide that table 1 should float, table 2 is a longtable and table 3 should > be in a wrapped by text. You see my point of the "author" perspective? > I hope that this discussion will lead to a better specification of these > problems.
You have a point. Note that the people here can change lyx but not latex, and part of the problem here is how latex works. Latex support two kinds of tables. One that is never broken up - this kind may go directly in a document or in some kind of floating object or in a text wrapping construct. The long table is the other kind, it will be broken up to fit the pages. Other table-related stuff like captions and automatic listing in a "list of tables" isn't table properties, it is properties of the float object. The table user interface could easily be modified to have a four-way choice of floating/wrapped/nonfloating/longtable as a table property. But then people would wonder why the caption disappears when they switch the table to non-floating - because latex don't support a caption in that case. Well, perhaps the "dirty tricks" mentioned could become part of the conversion from .lyx to .tex Another problem: A user might want to do stuff like I do - such as putting a figure+a table in the same float. That works fine if you start with an empty float and fills it in with the other stuff. But what should your user do if he started with one of your kind of "table with the floating option checked"? Will there be an easy conversion from "table that is implicitly floating" to a float inset that happens to contain a table? And how about reversing such a conversion - what if there is more stuff in the float than just the table? Helge Hafting
