This is mostly a recommendation for a small change to the User's Guide. If the change has been made in LyX 1.6 (I'm still on LyX 1.5.7, WinXP, examples in basic article class), or if I have otherwise blundered in proffering advice (known to happen), I apologize. I've been a LyX user for a long while now, but often discover simple things I should already know.
I suggest that the description of how spacing is handled around floats (figure floats in my case) can be improved slightly in the User's Guide. In particular, I am referring to the advice in section 4.6, which seems incomplete: "It is recommended to insert floats as a separate paragraph to avoid possible LaTeX-errors that can occur when the surrounding text is specially formatted." Without specific advice about how to center a floated figure in the document, this advice leaves the user an unclear impression of how to proceed. Intuitively (perhaps), one would change the paragraph settings for the environment containing the widget, but that would not work well and would leave a nasty space where the float was inserted (not where it ends up). What the user probably wants a figure float set in its own environment as recommended above, but with the graphic in the float centered by changing the paragraph settings for the graphic *within* the float. This leaves the widget at left in the LyX view, which corresponds with the collapsed floats in the User's Guide (a hint?). To me this behavior is not intuitive and in fact may also be undesirable for editing purposes -- personally I'd prefer the widgets centered through, making them easy to find like display equations. As far as I can tell, there is no way to center those widgets in the display without causing a problem in the output. -- Dave Hewitt Klamath Falls, Oregon
