Uwe Stöhr schrieb:
I wrote:
I'm proud to announce the new extended LyX manual about Floats, Notes,
Tables, Graphics, and Boxes.
The manual can be downloaded from
http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/DocumentationDevelopment#Extended-Insets
I'm happily surprized that I got so much feedback about this.
Hi Uwe,
Just want to send you a big "THANK YOU" - this is a wonderful document!
I especially like your approach of not refraining from falling back to
ERT boxes, but providing lots of examples to achieve things with just a
little bit of extra LaTeX code.
For people like me, who have started with LyX without any LaTeX
background this is just perfect. I really do not mind to have to insert
LaTeX snippets for certain formattings and other advanced stuff. The
tedious and frustrating part is, however, to find the right snippets and
packages and to understand where exactly to insert the ERT boxes and how
they interact with the LyX code. Your manual provides exactly this kind
of information.
Just two suggestions:
1) An example, how to define the character style (font, size) to be used
as default for all cells of a table would be cool.
2) An example, how to modify the in-cell margins (the space between the
table grid lines and the actual cell data) would be great as well. IMHO,
the LyX/LaTeX defaults waste way to much space here, however, all my
attempts to change this have failed so far :-(
>>>>>>>>>>
Personal side comment: Having tried a couple of times, I still think
that LaTeX really sucks compared to visual tools like Word or Excel if
it comes to creating non-trivial tables. This is especially true, if
one has to build dense, space-optimized tables which present a huge set
of information in as little space as possible e.g. because there is some
page-limit. The manual fiddling with column-widths, in-cell line breaks
and stuff like that is just painful and the graphical table editor in
LyX is not really helpful for this task either, as one has to control
the output anyway. Often the LyX-Representation is even
contra-intuitive: One has to set very small column width in LyX (which
makes the cells in the LyX-Editor almost unreadable and uneditable) to
get the optimal width in the DVI/PDF output.
As a consequence, I often end up in designing my tables with Word or
Excel and printing them into an EPS file...
There is one exception, though. The LaTeX support for long tables is
definitely better. However, I barely need long tables. In most cases, I
just want it "to make my table fit on the page".
<<<<<<<<<<
Daniel
