On 10/3/05, Bo Peng <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Oh, I see, this is poor men's scientific workplace".
>
I get his first complain against lyx today: "The lyx file is corrupted
after I edit your formula, I hope that you can open this file...". The
real problem, as I later found out, is that he accidentally inserted a
math symbol \times in a \textrm box, a problem I had asked for a
thorough solution many times in this list.
I think this is a perfect complain from a new lyx user, warning us
about the userfriendlyness of lyx. There are good reasons why lyx
behaves this way but this little problem may have driven hundreds of
lyx users away.
As a matter of fact,
1. lyx1.2.x automatically switch to math mode if a user enter a math
symbol in a text box. This worked very well in practise.
2. lyx 1.3.x introduces nested ?? and allows insertion of math symbol
in text mode. This has caused *many* problems for new users. Note that
this problem is hard to find even in an exported latex file.
Andre' insisted that users *should be able to tell blue (math) from
black (text) and a black math symbol is enough to indicate a wrong
formula'. However, in reality,
1. Many users do not know latex that well to know $\textrm{\alpha}$ is wrong.
2. Many users do not know the difference between blue and black symbols.
3. The error message does not help. There may be several errors, far
away from the original location, and tell something totally
irrelevant. This is enough to scare newbies away.
I remember that one technique problem was that we can not list all
math symbols so we do not know exactly what is *not* allowed in
\textrm. However, statistically speaking, it is more than enough to
disallow 100 commonly used symbols in \textrm. I assume that the rest
of the 0.01% users, if they know some rarely used symbols, must have
known latex/lyx well enough to figure out the problem by themselves.
Bo
