Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Nikos Alexandris]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 17:43 +0100, Jose Quesada wrote:
 btw, to those jabref users eyeing zotero for the fast ref capture who would
 not use it because you had to export to bib first... the new FF addon LyZ
 makes this on the fly. It's a killer feature, two clicks and you are done.
 And your lib is on the cloud for free...
 Best,
 -Jose

That is *really* excellent! Thanks for the hint,
Nikos

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Nikos Alexandris]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 17:43 +0100, Jose Quesada wrote:
 btw, to those jabref users eyeing zotero for the fast ref capture who would
 not use it because you had to export to bib first... the new FF addon LyZ
 makes this on the fly. It's a killer feature, two clicks and you are done.
 And your lib is on the cloud for free...
 Best,
 -Jose

That is *really* excellent! Thanks for the hint,
Nikos

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Nikos Alexandris]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 17:43 +0100, Jose Quesada wrote:
> btw, to those jabref users eyeing zotero for the fast ref capture who would
> not use it because you had to export to bib first... the new FF addon LyZ
> makes this on the fly. It's a killer feature, two clicks and you are done.
> And your lib is on the cloud for free...
> Best,
> -Jose

That is *really* excellent! Thanks for the hint,
Nikos

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via 
enterfile 'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child files, and 
collects details of any included and other data files. These component files, 
are then all put into a single directory (thus “flattening” the document’s 
directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay. 

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
enterfile  'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child files, and
collects details of any included and other data files. These component files,
are then all put into a single directory (thus “flattening” the document’s
directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay.

   
This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter 
chain.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Am Saturday 03 April 2010 15:13:22 schrieb rgheck:
 On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
  Just wondering:
 
  Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
  enterfile  'external material' ?
 
  Wolfgang
 
  From
  http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html
 
  Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.
 
  The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child
  files, and collects details of any included and other data files. These
  component files, are then all put into a single directory (thus
  “flattening” the document’s directory tree).
 
  The author is Cengiz Gunay.

 This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter
 chain.

 rh

and how could I do it?

Wolfgang

-- 
-
Wolfgang Engelmann
Schlossgartenstrasse 22
D-72070 Tübingen
Tel 07071 68325

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 04/03/2010 11:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Am Saturday 03 April 2010 15:13:22 schrieb rgheck:
   

On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
 

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
enterfile   'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child
files, and collects details of any included and other data files. These
component files, are then all put into a single directory (thus
“flattening” the document’s directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay.
   

This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter
chain.

 

and how could I do it?

   
Define a new format, ltxpak, and then declare texdirflatten as a 
latex--ltxpak converter. With appropriate arguments, of course. This 
all gets done under ToolsPreferencesFile Handling.


There is a complication, namely, that everything is going to happen here 
in LyX's temporary directory. So what I think will happen is that 
texdirflatten will create its directory at e.g.

/tmp/lyx_tmpdir.X0765/lyx_tmpbuf0/flat/
and now the question is: How do we export this? i.e., copy it to the 
original file location? Answer: We define a copier, and tell it to 
copy this directory to the original document directory. Have a look at 
the ext_copy.py copier that is used with the LaTeX--HTML converters. 
You may be able to use that, or at least to adapt it to your purposes.


Copiers, etc, are all discussed in the Customization manual.

rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via 
enterfile 'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child files, and 
collects details of any included and other data files. These component files, 
are then all put into a single directory (thus “flattening” the document’s 
directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay. 

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
enterfile  'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child files, and
collects details of any included and other data files. These component files,
are then all put into a single directory (thus “flattening” the document’s
directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay.

   
This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter 
chain.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Am Saturday 03 April 2010 15:13:22 schrieb rgheck:
 On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
  Just wondering:
 
  Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
  enterfile  'external material' ?
 
  Wolfgang
 
  From
  http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html
 
  Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.
 
  The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child
  files, and collects details of any included and other data files. These
  component files, are then all put into a single directory (thus
  “flattening” the document’s directory tree).
 
  The author is Cengiz Gunay.

 This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter
 chain.

 rh

and how could I do it?

Wolfgang

-- 
-
Wolfgang Engelmann
Schlossgartenstrasse 22
D-72070 Tübingen
Tel 07071 68325

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 04/03/2010 11:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Am Saturday 03 April 2010 15:13:22 schrieb rgheck:
   

On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
 

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
enterfile   'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child
files, and collects details of any included and other data files. These
component files, are then all put into a single directory (thus
“flattening” the document’s directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay.
   

This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter
chain.

 

and how could I do it?

   
Define a new format, ltxpak, and then declare texdirflatten as a 
latex--ltxpak converter. With appropriate arguments, of course. This 
all gets done under ToolsPreferencesFile Handling.


There is a complication, namely, that everything is going to happen here 
in LyX's temporary directory. So what I think will happen is that 
texdirflatten will create its directory at e.g.

/tmp/lyx_tmpdir.X0765/lyx_tmpbuf0/flat/
and now the question is: How do we export this? i.e., copy it to the 
original file location? Answer: We define a copier, and tell it to 
copy this directory to the original document directory. Have a look at 
the ext_copy.py copier that is used with the LaTeX--HTML converters. 
You may be able to use that, or at least to adapt it to your purposes.


Copiers, etc, are all discussed in the Customization manual.

rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via 
enter>file> 'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child files, and 
collects details of any included and other data files. These component files, 
are then all put into a single directory (thus “flattening” the document’s 
directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay. 

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
enter>file>  'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child files, and
collects details of any included and other data files. These component files,
are then all put into a single directory (thus “flattening” the document’s
directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay.

   
This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter 
chain.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Am Saturday 03 April 2010 15:13:22 schrieb rgheck:
> On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
> > Just wondering:
> >
> > Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
> > enter>file>  'external material' ?
> >
> > Wolfgang
> >
> > From
> > http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html
> >
> > Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.
> >
> > The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child
> > files, and collects details of any included and other data files. These
> > component files, are then all put into a single directory (thus
> > “flattening” the document’s directory tree).
> >
> > The author is Cengiz Gunay.
>
> This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter
> chain.
>
> rh

and how could I do it?

Wolfgang

-- 
-
Wolfgang Engelmann
Schlossgartenstrasse 22
D-72070 Tübingen
Tel 07071 68325

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 04/03/2010 11:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Am Saturday 03 April 2010 15:13:22 schrieb rgheck:
   

On 04/03/2010 02:27 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
 

Just wondering:

Would the following be difficult to implement in Lyx or to use it via
enter>file>   'external material' ?

Wolfgang

From
http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdirflatten.html

Collect files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory.

The Perl script parses a LaTeX file recursively, scanning all child
files, and collects details of any included and other data files. These
component files, are then all put into a single directory (thus
“flattening” the document’s directory tree).

The author is Cengiz Gunay.
   

This looks like something that one would call as part of the converter
chain.

 

and how could I do it?

   
Define a new format, ltxpak, and then declare texdirflatten as a 
latex-->ltxpak converter. With appropriate arguments, of course. This 
all gets done under Tools>Preferences>File Handling.


There is a complication, namely, that everything is going to happen here 
in LyX's temporary directory. So what I think will happen is that 
texdirflatten will create its directory at e.g.

/tmp/lyx_tmpdir.X0765/lyx_tmpbuf0/flat/
and now the question is: How do we export this? i.e., copy it to the 
original file location? Answer: We define a "copier", and tell it to 
copy this directory to the original document directory. Have a look at 
the ext_copy.py copier that is used with the LaTeX-->HTML converters. 
You may be able to use that, or at least to adapt it to your purposes.


Copiers, etc, are all discussed in the Customization manual.

rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, rgheck wrote:
 On 03/23/2010 05:22 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:
 On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:

 As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the
 harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is
 styled by CSS. Then what do you do?

 Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
 that the website uses really good markup (text with HTML markup
 indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styleddiv  andspan  soups.


 The difficulty is that HTML is very limited in what it is capable of 
 marking, for the simple reason that there aren't very many tags. 

This is why our task becomes easy, if we decide to support HTML markup
only. 

Such a HTML importer would stand in the middle between simple text import
(no structure/markup preserved) and the annoying fully-formatted
pasting of some WPs. The basic structure of the document (lists,
sections, emphasized and preformatted text) is preserved in a WYSIWYG
way.

 LyX character styles, for example, would almost uniformly correspond to
 span, except for the handful of obvious exceptions. That, it seems to
 me, is why use div and span for everything has become almost the
 norm.  See e.g. elyxer's HTML output. LyX's is more flexible, because
 it is specifiable in the layout. But the problem remains.

Similar to the goal to achieve a loss-less lyx-latex-lyx round-trip,
we could (as a further option) extend the HTML importer to provide for
the features/constructs of the native HTML export.

Günter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
 Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run 
 through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters 
 which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it 
 would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those 
 characters. 

A generic error reporting for all programs called by LyX would be a great
help indeed.


For the Unicode in bibtex database problem, the solution might be to
use a unicode aware processor, e.g. 

 * CrossTeX_, a backwards-compatible, improved bibtex
   re-implementation in Python (including HTML export).
   (development stalled since 2 years)
   
 * Pybtex_,a drop-in replacement for BibTeX written in Python.
 
   * BibTeX styles  (experimental) pythonic style API.
   * Database in BibTeX, BibTeXML and YAML formats.
   * full Unicode support.
   * Write to TeX, HTML and plain text.

.. _CrossTeX: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/crosstex/
.. _Pybtex:   http://pybtex.sourceforge.net/


Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com wrote:
 On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:

 I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
 character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

 Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
 separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

Because CTAN contains the *LaTeX* packages/classes while for using
them in LyX, we need *in addition to them* also LyX modules/layouts.

This need for definitions on both, LyX and LaTeX levels is a main
reason why creating/editing LyX layouts is such a complex task.
(And also the base for much frustation for people with either a just a
LyX layout or just a LaTeX class or package.)

Günter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/25/2010 06:14 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-23, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
   

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
characters.
 

A generic error reporting for all programs called by LyX would be a great
help indeed.


For the Unicode in bibtex database problem, the solution might be to
use a unicode aware processor, e.g.

 * CrossTeX_, a backwards-compatible, improved bibtex
   re-implementation in Python (including HTML export).
   (development stalled since 2 years)

  * Pybtex_,a drop-in replacement for BibTeX written in Python.

   * BibTeX styles  (experimental) pythonic style API.
   * Database in BibTeX, BibTeXML and YAML formats.
   * full Unicode support.
   * Write to TeX, HTML and plain text.

.. _CrossTeX: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/crosstex/
.. _Pybtex:   http://pybtex.sourceforge.net/


   
You can also use biber with biblatex: 
http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/.


rh

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/25/2010 06:20 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-23, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
   

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Littsl...@troubleshooters.com  wrote:
 

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
   
   

I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...
   

Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?
 

Because CTAN contains the *LaTeX* packages/classes while for using
them in LyX, we need *in addition to them* also LyX modules/layouts.

This need for definitions on both, LyX and LaTeX levels is a main
reason why creating/editing LyX layouts is such a complex task.
(And also the base for much frustation for people with either a just a
LyX layout or just a LaTeX class or package.)

   
That said, beamer includes a LyX layout, and I would expect that many 
other classes would be happy to include layouts, too, if someone 
provided one. Alternatively, or additionally, we could ask the CTAN 
folks to create a place for LyX layouts, rather than hosting them on our 
own server.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Helge Hafting]

Jose Quesada wrote:

Hi all,

In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...

1. incremental search

That'd be nice, sure.


2. sentence autocapitalization


Can you specify a way to do this *correctly*, without having the 
computer make lots of mistakes?


Word has botched this completely - and it degrades the correspondence I 
get. (I know how to turn such things off, most people doesn't even know 
that it can be turned off.) I get letters where the word I is 
capitalized, which is wrong when the language isn't english, for example.



3. grammar check (not crucial)

Doable - do you know an open-source grammar checker we could use? LyX 
already use external programs for spellchecking. . .



4. search highlight occurences

For the incremental search, I guess?


6. edit history (go back to last edits). We seem to have only one step back?
Not sure what you mean here. You can undo much more than one step. All 
the way back to the state when the file was loaded into LyX, I believe.



7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't (clipboard
integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


LyX does not use rich text internally. It uses a very different 
format. I don't think a perfect converter can be made. Still, it might 
be possible to make a decent converter for common cases. If someone is 
interested in doing it, that is.




8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this and
it's damn inspired)


Might be useful. Can this information be fetched from the clipboard? Or 
how would LyX get this data? Inserting a note or comment with the URL 
wouldn't be hard to code, but how to get it in the first place?


Helge Hafting

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Helge Hafting]

Steve Litt wrote:

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.


It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 
pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not 
much of a Qt type of guy).




The customization manual already tells how to write a layout file.  One 
can specify a GUI for doing the same, removing much of the tediousness

and many possibilities for error. (For example, such a GUI would always
remember to put End somewhere after Style stylename.

This would give us an easy way of making layout files. The problem is, 
to do anything interesting with it, one would still need to know latex. 
 Instead of writing a .layout from scratch, you could fill out a form 
like this (the layoutmodule code from logical markup):


=
Type: charstyle  (alt. paragraph style, document class)
Name of your character style: Code

Font in LyX:
 Family: typewriter
 Size: unchanged
 weight: unchanged
 ...

Latex implementation: command  (alt. environment)
Latex command: code
Latex preamble: \newcommand{\code}[1]{\texttt{#1}}
=

Of course, many of the fields would be comboboxes, making it impossible 
to enter a wrong value.


The tricky parts would be the latex command or the preamble. Still, it 
might be useful for those who understands some latex.



Making a layout editor for people who don't understand latex is much 
harder. And to some extent pointless. If the layout editor understand 
more latex than lyx does, then perhaps the effort could be better spent 
on improving lyx instead. And if it understands less, then it doesn't 
implement all that LyX can do.


Still, one could perhaps have something like math macros, but for 
text. Let the user create a style by doing ordinary edits on a demo 
word. This way, a user could create a style for, say, big green boxed 
marginal notes by inserting a marginal note around the demo text, then 
a box, and then use the text style dialog to make the text big and green 
as well.


I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and 
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. A person could 
start with something close to what he wants and tweak it til it's right. Such 
a collection could come with a supporting document that organizes various 
environments and character styles in a hierarchy so that what you need is 
easily findable.




Yes, this can make LyX more and more useful. There will still be people
complaining that I can't make my own style in an easy way though. :-/

Helge Hafting

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, rgheck wrote:
 On 03/23/2010 05:22 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:
 On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:

 As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the
 harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is
 styled by CSS. Then what do you do?

 Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
 that the website uses really good markup (text with HTML markup
 indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styleddiv  andspan  soups.


 The difficulty is that HTML is very limited in what it is capable of 
 marking, for the simple reason that there aren't very many tags. 

This is why our task becomes easy, if we decide to support HTML markup
only. 

Such a HTML importer would stand in the middle between simple text import
(no structure/markup preserved) and the annoying fully-formatted
pasting of some WPs. The basic structure of the document (lists,
sections, emphasized and preformatted text) is preserved in a WYSIWYG
way.

 LyX character styles, for example, would almost uniformly correspond to
 span, except for the handful of obvious exceptions. That, it seems to
 me, is why use div and span for everything has become almost the
 norm.  See e.g. elyxer's HTML output. LyX's is more flexible, because
 it is specifiable in the layout. But the problem remains.

Similar to the goal to achieve a loss-less lyx-latex-lyx round-trip,
we could (as a further option) extend the HTML importer to provide for
the features/constructs of the native HTML export.

Günter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
 Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run 
 through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters 
 which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it 
 would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those 
 characters. 

A generic error reporting for all programs called by LyX would be a great
help indeed.


For the Unicode in bibtex database problem, the solution might be to
use a unicode aware processor, e.g. 

 * CrossTeX_, a backwards-compatible, improved bibtex
   re-implementation in Python (including HTML export).
   (development stalled since 2 years)
   
 * Pybtex_,a drop-in replacement for BibTeX written in Python.
 
   * BibTeX styles  (experimental) pythonic style API.
   * Database in BibTeX, BibTeXML and YAML formats.
   * full Unicode support.
   * Write to TeX, HTML and plain text.

.. _CrossTeX: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/crosstex/
.. _Pybtex:   http://pybtex.sourceforge.net/


Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com wrote:
 On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:

 I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
 character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

 Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
 separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

Because CTAN contains the *LaTeX* packages/classes while for using
them in LyX, we need *in addition to them* also LyX modules/layouts.

This need for definitions on both, LyX and LaTeX levels is a main
reason why creating/editing LyX layouts is such a complex task.
(And also the base for much frustation for people with either a just a
LyX layout or just a LaTeX class or package.)

Günter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/25/2010 06:14 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-23, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
   

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
characters.
 

A generic error reporting for all programs called by LyX would be a great
help indeed.


For the Unicode in bibtex database problem, the solution might be to
use a unicode aware processor, e.g.

 * CrossTeX_, a backwards-compatible, improved bibtex
   re-implementation in Python (including HTML export).
   (development stalled since 2 years)

  * Pybtex_,a drop-in replacement for BibTeX written in Python.

   * BibTeX styles  (experimental) pythonic style API.
   * Database in BibTeX, BibTeXML and YAML formats.
   * full Unicode support.
   * Write to TeX, HTML and plain text.

.. _CrossTeX: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/crosstex/
.. _Pybtex:   http://pybtex.sourceforge.net/


   
You can also use biber with biblatex: 
http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/.


rh

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/25/2010 06:20 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-23, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
   

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Littsl...@troubleshooters.com  wrote:
 

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
   
   

I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...
   

Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?
 

Because CTAN contains the *LaTeX* packages/classes while for using
them in LyX, we need *in addition to them* also LyX modules/layouts.

This need for definitions on both, LyX and LaTeX levels is a main
reason why creating/editing LyX layouts is such a complex task.
(And also the base for much frustation for people with either a just a
LyX layout or just a LaTeX class or package.)

   
That said, beamer includes a LyX layout, and I would expect that many 
other classes would be happy to include layouts, too, if someone 
provided one. Alternatively, or additionally, we could ask the CTAN 
folks to create a place for LyX layouts, rather than hosting them on our 
own server.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Helge Hafting]

Jose Quesada wrote:

Hi all,

In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...

1. incremental search

That'd be nice, sure.


2. sentence autocapitalization


Can you specify a way to do this *correctly*, without having the 
computer make lots of mistakes?


Word has botched this completely - and it degrades the correspondence I 
get. (I know how to turn such things off, most people doesn't even know 
that it can be turned off.) I get letters where the word I is 
capitalized, which is wrong when the language isn't english, for example.



3. grammar check (not crucial)

Doable - do you know an open-source grammar checker we could use? LyX 
already use external programs for spellchecking. . .



4. search highlight occurences

For the incremental search, I guess?


6. edit history (go back to last edits). We seem to have only one step back?
Not sure what you mean here. You can undo much more than one step. All 
the way back to the state when the file was loaded into LyX, I believe.



7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't (clipboard
integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


LyX does not use rich text internally. It uses a very different 
format. I don't think a perfect converter can be made. Still, it might 
be possible to make a decent converter for common cases. If someone is 
interested in doing it, that is.




8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this and
it's damn inspired)


Might be useful. Can this information be fetched from the clipboard? Or 
how would LyX get this data? Inserting a note or comment with the URL 
wouldn't be hard to code, but how to get it in the first place?


Helge Hafting

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Helge Hafting]

Steve Litt wrote:

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.


It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 
pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not 
much of a Qt type of guy).




The customization manual already tells how to write a layout file.  One 
can specify a GUI for doing the same, removing much of the tediousness

and many possibilities for error. (For example, such a GUI would always
remember to put End somewhere after Style stylename.

This would give us an easy way of making layout files. The problem is, 
to do anything interesting with it, one would still need to know latex. 
 Instead of writing a .layout from scratch, you could fill out a form 
like this (the layoutmodule code from logical markup):


=
Type: charstyle  (alt. paragraph style, document class)
Name of your character style: Code

Font in LyX:
 Family: typewriter
 Size: unchanged
 weight: unchanged
 ...

Latex implementation: command  (alt. environment)
Latex command: code
Latex preamble: \newcommand{\code}[1]{\texttt{#1}}
=

Of course, many of the fields would be comboboxes, making it impossible 
to enter a wrong value.


The tricky parts would be the latex command or the preamble. Still, it 
might be useful for those who understands some latex.



Making a layout editor for people who don't understand latex is much 
harder. And to some extent pointless. If the layout editor understand 
more latex than lyx does, then perhaps the effort could be better spent 
on improving lyx instead. And if it understands less, then it doesn't 
implement all that LyX can do.


Still, one could perhaps have something like math macros, but for 
text. Let the user create a style by doing ordinary edits on a demo 
word. This way, a user could create a style for, say, big green boxed 
marginal notes by inserting a marginal note around the demo text, then 
a box, and then use the text style dialog to make the text big and green 
as well.


I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and 
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. A person could 
start with something close to what he wants and tweak it til it's right. Such 
a collection could come with a supporting document that organizes various 
environments and character styles in a hierarchy so that what you need is 
easily findable.




Yes, this can make LyX more and more useful. There will still be people
complaining that I can't make my own style in an easy way though. :-/

Helge Hafting

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, rgheck wrote:
> On 03/23/2010 05:22 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:
>> On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:

>>> As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the
>>> harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is
>>> styled by CSS. Then what do you do?

>> Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
>> that the website uses "really good" markup (text with HTML markup
>> indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styled  and  soups.


> The difficulty is that HTML is very limited in what it is capable of 
> marking, for the simple reason that there aren't very many tags. 

This is why our task becomes easy, if we decide to support HTML markup
only. 

Such a HTML importer would stand in the middle between simple text import
(no structure/markup preserved) and the "annoying" fully-formatted
pasting of some WPs. The basic structure of the document (lists,
sections, emphasized and preformatted text) is preserved in a WYSIWYG
way.

> LyX character styles, for example, would almost uniformly correspond to
> "span", except for the handful of obvious exceptions. That, it seems to
> me, is why "use div and span for everything" has become almost the
> norm.  See e.g. elyxer's HTML output. LyX's is more flexible, because
> it is specifiable in the layout. But the problem remains.

Similar to the goal to achieve a loss-less lyx->latex->lyx round-trip,
we could (as a further option) extend the HTML importer to provide for
the features/constructs of the native HTML export.

Günter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
> Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run 
> through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters 
> which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it 
> would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those 
> characters. 

A generic error reporting for all programs called by LyX would be a great
help indeed.


For the "Unicode in bibtex database problem", the solution might be to
use a unicode aware processor, e.g. 

 * CrossTeX_, a backwards-compatible, improved bibtex
   re-implementation in Python (including HTML export).
   (development stalled since 2 years)
   
 * Pybtex_,a drop-in replacement for BibTeX written in Python.
 
   * BibTeX styles & (experimental) pythonic style API.
   * Database in BibTeX, BibTeXML and YAML formats.
   * full Unicode support.
   * Write to TeX, HTML and plain text.

.. _CrossTeX: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/crosstex/
.. _Pybtex:   http://pybtex.sourceforge.net/


Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-23, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt  wrote:
>> On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:

>> I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
>> character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

> Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
> separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

Because CTAN contains the *LaTeX* packages/classes while for using
them in LyX, we need *in addition to them* also LyX modules/layouts.

This need for definitions on both, LyX and LaTeX levels is a main
reason why creating/editing LyX layouts is such a complex task.
(And also the base for much frustation for people with either a just a
LyX layout or just a LaTeX class or package.)

Günter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/25/2010 06:14 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-23, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
   

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
characters.
 

A generic error reporting for all programs called by LyX would be a great
help indeed.


For the "Unicode in bibtex database problem", the solution might be to
use a unicode aware processor, e.g.

 * CrossTeX_, a backwards-compatible, improved bibtex
   re-implementation in Python (including HTML export).
   (development stalled since 2 years)

  * Pybtex_,a drop-in replacement for BibTeX written in Python.

   * BibTeX styles&  (experimental) pythonic style API.
   * Database in BibTeX, BibTeXML and YAML formats.
   * full Unicode support.
   * Write to TeX, HTML and plain text.

.. _CrossTeX: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/crosstex/
.. _Pybtex:   http://pybtex.sourceforge.net/


   
You can also use biber with biblatex: 
http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/.


rh

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/25/2010 06:20 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-23, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
   

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt  wrote:
 

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
   
   

I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...
   

Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?
 

Because CTAN contains the *LaTeX* packages/classes while for using
them in LyX, we need *in addition to them* also LyX modules/layouts.

This need for definitions on both, LyX and LaTeX levels is a main
reason why creating/editing LyX layouts is such a complex task.
(And also the base for much frustation for people with either a just a
LyX layout or just a LaTeX class or package.)

   
That said, beamer includes a LyX layout, and I would expect that many 
other classes would be happy to include layouts, too, if someone 
provided one. Alternatively, or additionally, we could ask the CTAN 
folks to create a place for LyX layouts, rather than hosting them on our 
own server.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Helge Hafting]

Jose Quesada wrote:

Hi all,

In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...

1. incremental search

That'd be nice, sure.


2. sentence autocapitalization


Can you specify a way to do this *correctly*, without having the 
computer make lots of mistakes?


Word has botched this completely - and it degrades the correspondence I 
get. (I know how to turn such things off, most people doesn't even know 
that it can be turned off.) I get letters where the word "I" is 
capitalized, which is wrong when the language isn't english, for example.



3. grammar check (not crucial)

Doable - do you know an open-source grammar checker we could use? LyX 
already use external programs for spellchecking. . .



4. search highlight occurences

For the incremental search, I guess?


6. edit history (go back to last edits). We seem to have only one step back?
Not sure what you mean here. You can "undo" much more than one step. All 
the way back to the state when the file was loaded into LyX, I believe.



7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't (clipboard
integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


LyX does not use "rich text" internally. It uses a very different 
format. I don't think a perfect converter can be made. Still, it might 
be possible to make a decent converter for common cases. If someone is 
interested in doing it, that is.




8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this and
it's damn inspired)


Might be useful. Can this information be fetched from the clipboard? Or 
how would LyX get this data? Inserting a note or comment with the URL 
wouldn't be hard to code, but how to get it in the first place?


Helge Hafting

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Helge Hafting]

Steve Litt wrote:

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.


It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 
pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not 
much of a Qt type of guy).




The customization manual already tells how to write a layout file.  One 
can specify a GUI for doing the same, removing much of the tediousness

and many possibilities for error. (For example, such a GUI would always
remember to put "End" somewhere after "Style stylename".

This would give us an "easy" way of making layout files. The problem is, 
to do anything interesting with it, one would still need to know latex. 
 Instead of writing a .layout from scratch, you could fill out a form 
like this (the layoutmodule "code" from logical markup):


=
Type: charstyle  (alt. paragraph style, document class)
Name of your character style: Code

Font in LyX:
 Family: typewriter
 Size: unchanged
 weight: unchanged
 ...

Latex implementation: command  (alt. environment)
Latex command: code
Latex preamble: \newcommand{\code}[1]{\texttt{#1}}
=

Of course, many of the fields would be comboboxes, making it impossible 
to enter a wrong value.


The tricky parts would be the latex command or the preamble. Still, it 
might be useful for those who understands some latex.



Making a layout editor for people who don't understand latex is much 
harder. And to some extent pointless. If the layout editor understand 
more latex than lyx does, then perhaps the effort could be better spent 
on improving lyx instead. And if it understands less, then it doesn't 
implement all that LyX can do.


Still, one could perhaps have something like "math macros", but for 
text. Let the user create a style by doing ordinary edits on a demo 
word. This way, a user could create a style for, say, "big green boxed 
marginal notes" by inserting a marginal note around the demo text, then 
a box, and then use the text style dialog to make the text big and green 
as well.


I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and 
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. A person could 
start with something close to what he wants and tweak it til it's right. Such 
a collection could come with a supporting document that organizes various 
environments and character styles in a hierarchy so that what you need is 
easily findable.




Yes, this can make LyX more and more useful. There will still be people
complaining that "I can't make my own style in an easy way" though. :-/

Helge Hafting

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jürgen Spitzmüller]

Guenter Milde wrote:
  Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
  point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
  take
  care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
  braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy
  OOo camper. Which I am not.
 
 Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
 comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
 ... as an option would be an enhancement.

What we could do is implement some extended paste option that runs a converter 
(HTML-LaTeX-LyX in that case). In the same vein, LyX could import LaTeX 
snippets on the fly.

But this should not _replace_ the current paste functionality, but rather 
complement it.

Jürgen

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

  Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
  comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
  ... as an option would be an enhancement.

 What we could do is implement some extended paste option that runs a
 converter
 (HTML-LaTeX-LyX in that case). In the same vein, LyX could import LaTeX
 snippets on the fly.

 But this should not _replace_ the current paste functionality, but rather
 complement it.


I agree, this could be the way to go. There could be 'paste plain' and
'paste formatted' options.
I think this is harder than it seems. Very few notetakers do this. An zero
do this consistently. On linux, none.

I use lyx for journal articles, and notetaking. On linux, it offers a better
notetaking solution than any other tool (before I was using keepnote). This
is telling: a tool that was not intended as a notetaker beats all the
specialized ones. On win, onenote does everything I need, but I wanted to
not have vendor lock-in and a plain text format. So lyx does this for me.
This is why pasting snippets from the web is important. And outputting html
trough the clipboard (something that we can sorta do with lyxblogger, but it
misses images) is damn important for me too.

One big disadvantage of using lyx is that it's hard to collaborate. Even
though the 'track changes' option is superior to anything plain latex can
offer, I still get comments on pdf edits... or worse, handwritten notes and
scanned as pdf again. this sets me back dozens of hours. I've never been
able to convince anyone to use lyx. Word users, even when show were to click
to track changes and insert notes, still edit the pdf. And you do have to
muck around with styles, layouts etc. You need to know some latex. Never
converted anyone.

For latex users, I convert to latex to get their comments. This has the
nasty property that the latest version, with all corrections, is latex, not
lyx.

All in all, I'm torn. I'm not sure I can ever circunvent the disadvantages,
and the advantages are not that great. Even though I'm a linux person, I
admit that using office well can get you close to what you want in terms of
writing structured docs. I just don't like the vendor lock-in... or having
to run windows to write papers :)


 Jürgen

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Julio Rojas]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook jtw...@ttlc.net wrote:
 Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
 spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
 thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
 misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
 replacement word}

Sorry to tell you, but this feature has been already included in 2.0.
Nontheless, as I have said, it is a feature prominently directed to
non native English speakers, as we tend to make considerably more
spelling mistakes. Don't worry, you can deactivate it.

 ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
 using it. :D

 In the long run, I think the joke's on them...

Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
document.

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

btw, a chrome extension that does the copy url thing...
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bijpdibkloghppkbmhcklkogpjaenfkg
Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Julio Rojas jcredbe...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook jtw...@ttlc.net
 wrote:
  Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
  spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
  thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
  misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
  replacement word}

 Sorry to tell you, but this feature has been already included in 2.0.
 Nontheless, as I have said, it is a feature prominently directed to
 non native English speakers, as we tend to make considerably more
 spelling mistakes. Don't worry, you can deactivate it.

  ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
  using it. :D
 
  In the long run, I think the joke's on them...

 Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
 on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
 finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
 wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
 directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
 document.

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Walter van Holst]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:15:08 +0100, Julio Rojas jcredbe...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
 on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
 finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
 wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
 directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
 document.

I would love to have a layout editor in LyX. There is still lots of
untapped potential for LyX. I'm a legal professional and none in that
profession doesn't have a visceral hate for Word's abilities to destroy a
contract's structure.

Regards,

 Walter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:
 On 03/22/2010 05:30 AM, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
 On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Jose Quesadaques...@gmail.com  wrote:

 Let me try to motivate this feature.
 1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.

NO:

 And your regex hits things that are *not* sentence starts, e. g. this
 example, which includes abbreviations e. g. like e. g.

 Which is one of the major problems with autocaps. Yes, you can have some 
 list of exceptions, but then you need a list of exceptions to the 
 exceptions.

This gets even more and more complicated if you want to do this for
all languages LyX supports.

 2- The only way to check whether you have missed a capital is by loading all
 your lyx files on a text editor that supports regex and painfully check
 results of \.\s+[a-z] one by one. Not efficient.

LyX 2.0 will come with regexp-search.

 3- I hate to do keyboard combos. they are bad for rsi and slower overall.
 Autocapitalization would save thousands of those a month.

However, there is a big difference whether you need to press
Alt-something or Shift-letter, as the latter is in a suitable place
(from the old typewriter days). 

Besides: in German, wherea all Nouns are capitalized, the Saving
would be about ten Percent maximum.

 say copy-paste from browsers. keeping basic formatting (headings, bold)
 would be good.,
...

 As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the 
 harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is 
 styled by CSS. Then what do you do?

Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
that the website uses really good markup (text with HTML markup
indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styled div and span soups.

With native HTML export, native HTML import seems like a logical
extension.

Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com wrote:
 On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
 The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
 would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.

 It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout
 editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either
 pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not
 much of a Qt type of guy).

It would be a useful feature to have and something that I've looked
for in the TeX/LaTeX environment for decades. Simple word processors
achieve it by allowing documents to be created as templates. So it is
a real shame that TeX has never had anything equivalent other than
trial and error.

 I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
 character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

 Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are so
 much simpler than LaTeX.

And doesn't Scribus (as a DTP package using XML) have a layout editor.

Regards, Trevor.

 Re: deemed!

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Rainer M Krug]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Trevor Jenkins bslwann...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com
 wrote:
  On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
  The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
  would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
 
  It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout
  editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either
  pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm
 not
  much of a Qt type of guy).

 It would be a useful feature to have and something that I've looked
 for in the TeX/LaTeX environment for decades. Simple word processors
 achieve it by allowing documents to be created as templates. So it is
 a real shame that TeX has never had anything equivalent other than
 trial and error.

  I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments
 and
  character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

 Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
 separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

  Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are
 so
  much simpler than LaTeX.

 And doesn't Scribus (as a DTP package using XML) have a layout editor.


I agree that there are MANY different options for formating, but couldn't
one start with a basic layout editors, which only include a subset of the
formating options, namely the ones which are mainly used for paragraph
styles? In this case, one might be able to limit the number of formating
options to e.g. 10, and if further fine-tuning is necessaary, it needs to be
done by hand (in a kind of ert box in LyX) in the editor. Together with a
display on how the format would look, that would be brilliant.

Rainer



 Regards, Trevor.

  Re: deemed!




-- 
NEW GERMAN FAX NUMBER!!!

Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation Biology,
UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany)

Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology
Natural Sciences Building
Office Suite 2039
Stellenbosch University
Main Campus, Merriman Avenue
Stellenbosch
South Africa

Cell:   +27 - (0)83 9479 042
Fax:+27 - (0)86 516 2782
Fax:+49 - (0)321 2125 2244
email:  rai...@krugs.de

Skype:  RMkrug
Google: r.m.k...@gmail.com

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/22/2010 10:52 PM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

It would appear that on Mar 22, Julio Rojas did say:

   

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
 

Don't know much about that... I just use LyX, I don't really understand it
very well, so I'm not grasping the advantages of this feature ?

   
I would recommend learning about layouts, as that is where the real 
power of LyX lies.

The second one I miss, mostly because I'm not a native English speaker,
is online spell checking, but that is coming in 2.0.
 

Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
thinks I misspelled something.

   
It will do this if you turn on continuous spell-checking. It won't if 
you don't.



{or even worse silently replacing
misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
replacement word}

   

It will not do this.

rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/23/2010 05:22 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:
   


As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the
harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is
styled by CSS. Then what do you do?
 

Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
that the website uses really good markup (text with HTML markup
indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styleddiv  andspan  soups.

   
The difficulty is that HTML is very limited in what it is capable of 
marking, for the simple reason that there aren't very many tags. LyX 
character styles, for example, would almost uniformly correspond to 
span, except for the handful of obvious exceptions. That, it seems to 
me, is why use div and span for everything has become almost the norm. 
See e.g. elyxer's HTML output. LyX's is more flexible, because it is 
specifiable in the layout. But the problem remains.


Richard

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run 
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters 
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it 
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those 
characters. 

I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I 
enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx document 
is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering 
reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very 
time consuming and frustrating. 

My solution now is to check after each new reference whether the pdf export is  
allright. That is cumbersome, but still faster than hunting for the offending 
characters after entering a big bunch of references.

It would be interesting to know, what kind of problems other people of this 
list do/did experience while working with lyx.

Wolfgang

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/23/2010 09:43 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
characters.

I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I
enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx document
is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering
reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very
time consuming and frustrating.

   
I'd suggest reporting this to the JabRef folks. Perhaps they should have 
an option to save in something other than UTF-8, and even to convert 
illegal characters to LaTeX equivalents.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

btw, to those jabref users eyeing zotero for the fast ref capture who would
not use it because you had to export to bib first... the new FF addon LyZ
makes this on the fly. It's a killer feature, two clicks and you are done.
And your lib is on the cloud for free...
Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:02 PM, rgheck rgh...@bobjweil.com wrote:

 On 03/23/2010 09:43 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

 Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not
 run
 through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some
 characters
 which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
 would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
 characters.

 I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I
 enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx
 document
 is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering
 reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very
 time consuming and frustrating.



 I'd suggest reporting this to the JabRef folks. Perhaps they should have an
 option to save in something other than UTF-8, and even to convert illegal
 characters to LaTeX equivalents.

 rh

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Pavel Sanda]

Steve Litt wrote:
 It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
 editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 

note that we did some specification already - year or two ago, just the coder
was not found ;) look on the archive if you want some inspiration.

pavel

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jürgen Spitzmüller]

Guenter Milde wrote:
  Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
  point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
  take
  care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
  braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy
  OOo camper. Which I am not.
 
 Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
 comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
 ... as an option would be an enhancement.

What we could do is implement some extended paste option that runs a converter 
(HTML-LaTeX-LyX in that case). In the same vein, LyX could import LaTeX 
snippets on the fly.

But this should not _replace_ the current paste functionality, but rather 
complement it.

Jürgen

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

  Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
  comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
  ... as an option would be an enhancement.

 What we could do is implement some extended paste option that runs a
 converter
 (HTML-LaTeX-LyX in that case). In the same vein, LyX could import LaTeX
 snippets on the fly.

 But this should not _replace_ the current paste functionality, but rather
 complement it.


I agree, this could be the way to go. There could be 'paste plain' and
'paste formatted' options.
I think this is harder than it seems. Very few notetakers do this. An zero
do this consistently. On linux, none.

I use lyx for journal articles, and notetaking. On linux, it offers a better
notetaking solution than any other tool (before I was using keepnote). This
is telling: a tool that was not intended as a notetaker beats all the
specialized ones. On win, onenote does everything I need, but I wanted to
not have vendor lock-in and a plain text format. So lyx does this for me.
This is why pasting snippets from the web is important. And outputting html
trough the clipboard (something that we can sorta do with lyxblogger, but it
misses images) is damn important for me too.

One big disadvantage of using lyx is that it's hard to collaborate. Even
though the 'track changes' option is superior to anything plain latex can
offer, I still get comments on pdf edits... or worse, handwritten notes and
scanned as pdf again. this sets me back dozens of hours. I've never been
able to convince anyone to use lyx. Word users, even when show were to click
to track changes and insert notes, still edit the pdf. And you do have to
muck around with styles, layouts etc. You need to know some latex. Never
converted anyone.

For latex users, I convert to latex to get their comments. This has the
nasty property that the latest version, with all corrections, is latex, not
lyx.

All in all, I'm torn. I'm not sure I can ever circunvent the disadvantages,
and the advantages are not that great. Even though I'm a linux person, I
admit that using office well can get you close to what you want in terms of
writing structured docs. I just don't like the vendor lock-in... or having
to run windows to write papers :)


 Jürgen

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Julio Rojas]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook jtw...@ttlc.net wrote:
 Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
 spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
 thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
 misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
 replacement word}

Sorry to tell you, but this feature has been already included in 2.0.
Nontheless, as I have said, it is a feature prominently directed to
non native English speakers, as we tend to make considerably more
spelling mistakes. Don't worry, you can deactivate it.

 ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
 using it. :D

 In the long run, I think the joke's on them...

Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
document.

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

btw, a chrome extension that does the copy url thing...
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bijpdibkloghppkbmhcklkogpjaenfkg
Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Julio Rojas jcredbe...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook jtw...@ttlc.net
 wrote:
  Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
  spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
  thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
  misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
  replacement word}

 Sorry to tell you, but this feature has been already included in 2.0.
 Nontheless, as I have said, it is a feature prominently directed to
 non native English speakers, as we tend to make considerably more
 spelling mistakes. Don't worry, you can deactivate it.

  ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
  using it. :D
 
  In the long run, I think the joke's on them...

 Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
 on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
 finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
 wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
 directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
 document.

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Walter van Holst]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:15:08 +0100, Julio Rojas jcredbe...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
 on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
 finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
 wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
 directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
 document.

I would love to have a layout editor in LyX. There is still lots of
untapped potential for LyX. I'm a legal professional and none in that
profession doesn't have a visceral hate for Word's abilities to destroy a
contract's structure.

Regards,

 Walter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:
 On 03/22/2010 05:30 AM, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
 On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Jose Quesadaques...@gmail.com  wrote:

 Let me try to motivate this feature.
 1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.

NO:

 And your regex hits things that are *not* sentence starts, e. g. this
 example, which includes abbreviations e. g. like e. g.

 Which is one of the major problems with autocaps. Yes, you can have some 
 list of exceptions, but then you need a list of exceptions to the 
 exceptions.

This gets even more and more complicated if you want to do this for
all languages LyX supports.

 2- The only way to check whether you have missed a capital is by loading all
 your lyx files on a text editor that supports regex and painfully check
 results of \.\s+[a-z] one by one. Not efficient.

LyX 2.0 will come with regexp-search.

 3- I hate to do keyboard combos. they are bad for rsi and slower overall.
 Autocapitalization would save thousands of those a month.

However, there is a big difference whether you need to press
Alt-something or Shift-letter, as the latter is in a suitable place
(from the old typewriter days). 

Besides: in German, wherea all Nouns are capitalized, the Saving
would be about ten Percent maximum.

 say copy-paste from browsers. keeping basic formatting (headings, bold)
 would be good.,
...

 As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the 
 harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is 
 styled by CSS. Then what do you do?

Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
that the website uses really good markup (text with HTML markup
indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styled div and span soups.

With native HTML export, native HTML import seems like a logical
extension.

Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com wrote:
 On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
 The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
 would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.

 It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout
 editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either
 pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not
 much of a Qt type of guy).

It would be a useful feature to have and something that I've looked
for in the TeX/LaTeX environment for decades. Simple word processors
achieve it by allowing documents to be created as templates. So it is
a real shame that TeX has never had anything equivalent other than
trial and error.

 I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
 character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

 Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are so
 much simpler than LaTeX.

And doesn't Scribus (as a DTP package using XML) have a layout editor.

Regards, Trevor.

 Re: deemed!

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Rainer M Krug]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Trevor Jenkins bslwann...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com
 wrote:
  On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
  The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
  would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
 
  It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout
  editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either
  pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm
 not
  much of a Qt type of guy).

 It would be a useful feature to have and something that I've looked
 for in the TeX/LaTeX environment for decades. Simple word processors
 achieve it by allowing documents to be created as templates. So it is
 a real shame that TeX has never had anything equivalent other than
 trial and error.

  I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments
 and
  character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

 Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
 separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

  Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are
 so
  much simpler than LaTeX.

 And doesn't Scribus (as a DTP package using XML) have a layout editor.


I agree that there are MANY different options for formating, but couldn't
one start with a basic layout editors, which only include a subset of the
formating options, namely the ones which are mainly used for paragraph
styles? In this case, one might be able to limit the number of formating
options to e.g. 10, and if further fine-tuning is necessaary, it needs to be
done by hand (in a kind of ert box in LyX) in the editor. Together with a
display on how the format would look, that would be brilliant.

Rainer



 Regards, Trevor.

  Re: deemed!




-- 
NEW GERMAN FAX NUMBER!!!

Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation Biology,
UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany)

Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology
Natural Sciences Building
Office Suite 2039
Stellenbosch University
Main Campus, Merriman Avenue
Stellenbosch
South Africa

Cell:   +27 - (0)83 9479 042
Fax:+27 - (0)86 516 2782
Fax:+49 - (0)321 2125 2244
email:  rai...@krugs.de

Skype:  RMkrug
Google: r.m.k...@gmail.com

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/22/2010 10:52 PM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

It would appear that on Mar 22, Julio Rojas did say:

   

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
 

Don't know much about that... I just use LyX, I don't really understand it
very well, so I'm not grasping the advantages of this feature ?

   
I would recommend learning about layouts, as that is where the real 
power of LyX lies.

The second one I miss, mostly because I'm not a native English speaker,
is online spell checking, but that is coming in 2.0.
 

Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
thinks I misspelled something.

   
It will do this if you turn on continuous spell-checking. It won't if 
you don't.



{or even worse silently replacing
misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
replacement word}

   

It will not do this.

rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/23/2010 05:22 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:
   


As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the
harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is
styled by CSS. Then what do you do?
 

Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
that the website uses really good markup (text with HTML markup
indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styleddiv  andspan  soups.

   
The difficulty is that HTML is very limited in what it is capable of 
marking, for the simple reason that there aren't very many tags. LyX 
character styles, for example, would almost uniformly correspond to 
span, except for the handful of obvious exceptions. That, it seems to 
me, is why use div and span for everything has become almost the norm. 
See e.g. elyxer's HTML output. LyX's is more flexible, because it is 
specifiable in the layout. But the problem remains.


Richard

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run 
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters 
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it 
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those 
characters. 

I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I 
enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx document 
is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering 
reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very 
time consuming and frustrating. 

My solution now is to check after each new reference whether the pdf export is  
allright. That is cumbersome, but still faster than hunting for the offending 
characters after entering a big bunch of references.

It would be interesting to know, what kind of problems other people of this 
list do/did experience while working with lyx.

Wolfgang

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/23/2010 09:43 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
characters.

I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I
enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx document
is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering
reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very
time consuming and frustrating.

   
I'd suggest reporting this to the JabRef folks. Perhaps they should have 
an option to save in something other than UTF-8, and even to convert 
illegal characters to LaTeX equivalents.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

btw, to those jabref users eyeing zotero for the fast ref capture who would
not use it because you had to export to bib first... the new FF addon LyZ
makes this on the fly. It's a killer feature, two clicks and you are done.
And your lib is on the cloud for free...
Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:02 PM, rgheck rgh...@bobjweil.com wrote:

 On 03/23/2010 09:43 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

 Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not
 run
 through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some
 characters
 which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
 would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
 characters.

 I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I
 enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx
 document
 is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering
 reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very
 time consuming and frustrating.



 I'd suggest reporting this to the JabRef folks. Perhaps they should have an
 option to save in something other than UTF-8, and even to convert illegal
 characters to LaTeX equivalents.

 rh

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Pavel Sanda]

Steve Litt wrote:
 It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
 editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 

note that we did some specification already - year or two ago, just the coder
was not found ;) look on the archive if you want some inspiration.

pavel

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jürgen Spitzmüller]

Guenter Milde wrote:
> > Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
> > point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
> > take
> > care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
> > braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy
> > OOo camper. Which I am not.
> 
> Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
> comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
> ... as an option would be an enhancement.

What we could do is implement some extended paste option that runs a converter 
(HTML->LaTeX->LyX in that case). In the same vein, LyX could import LaTeX 
snippets on the fly.

But this should not _replace_ the current paste functionality, but rather 
complement it.

Jürgen

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

>
> > Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
> > comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
> > ... as an option would be an enhancement.
>
> What we could do is implement some extended paste option that runs a
> converter
> (HTML->LaTeX->LyX in that case). In the same vein, LyX could import LaTeX
> snippets on the fly.
>
> But this should not _replace_ the current paste functionality, but rather
> complement it.
>
>
I agree, this could be the way to go. There could be 'paste plain' and
'paste formatted' options.
I think this is harder than it seems. Very few notetakers do this. An zero
do this consistently. On linux, none.

I use lyx for journal articles, and notetaking. On linux, it offers a better
notetaking solution than any other tool (before I was using keepnote). This
is telling: a tool that was not intended as a notetaker beats all the
specialized ones. On win, onenote does everything I need, but I wanted to
not have vendor lock-in and a plain text format. So lyx does this for me.
This is why pasting snippets from the web is important. And outputting html
trough the clipboard (something that we can sorta do with lyxblogger, but it
misses images) is damn important for me too.

One big disadvantage of using lyx is that it's hard to collaborate. Even
though the 'track changes' option is superior to anything plain latex can
offer, I still get comments on pdf edits... or worse, handwritten notes and
scanned as pdf again. this sets me back dozens of hours. I've never been
able to convince anyone to use lyx. Word users, even when show were to click
to track changes and insert notes, still edit the pdf. And you do have to
muck around with styles, layouts etc. You need to know some latex. Never
converted anyone.

For latex users, I convert to latex to get their comments. This has the
nasty property that the latest version, with all corrections, is latex, not
lyx.

All in all, I'm torn. I'm not sure I can ever circunvent the disadvantages,
and the advantages are not that great. Even though I'm a linux person, I
admit that using office well can get you close to what you want in terms of
writing structured docs. I just don't like the vendor lock-in... or having
to run windows to write papers :)


> Jürgen
>

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Julio Rojas]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook  wrote:
> Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
> spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
> thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
> misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
> replacement word}

Sorry to tell you, but this feature has been already included in 2.0.
Nontheless, as I have said, it is a feature prominently directed to
non native English speakers, as we tend to make considerably more
spelling mistakes. Don't worry, you can deactivate it.

>> ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
>> using it. :D
>
> In the long run, I think the joke's on them...

Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
document.

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

btw, a chrome extension that does the copy url thing...
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bijpdibkloghppkbmhcklkogpjaenfkg
Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Julio Rojas  wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook 
> wrote:
> > Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
> > spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
> > thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
> > misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
> > replacement word}
>
> Sorry to tell you, but this feature has been already included in 2.0.
> Nontheless, as I have said, it is a feature prominently directed to
> non native English speakers, as we tend to make considerably more
> spelling mistakes. Don't worry, you can deactivate it.
>
> >> ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
> >> using it. :D
> >
> > In the long run, I think the joke's on them...
>
> Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
> on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
> finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
> wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
> directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
> document.
>

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Walter van Holst]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:15:08 +0100, Julio Rojas 
wrote:

> Yup, this is what I think, but when you have several coworkers working
> on collaborative papers in several different LaTeX classes, they
> finally have the last laugh. This is why a layout editor would do
> wonders to convert our main target, people that already uses LaTeX
> directly who wants to speed up their writing and track changes on the
> document.

I would love to have a layout editor in LyX. There is still lots of
untapped potential for LyX. I'm a legal professional and none in that
profession doesn't have a visceral hate for Word's abilities to destroy a
contract's structure.

Regards,

 Walter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:
> On 03/22/2010 05:30 AM, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Jose Quesada  wrote:

>>> Let me try to motivate this feature.
>>> 1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.

NO:

>> And your regex hits things that are *not* sentence starts, e. g. this
>> example, which includes abbreviations e. g. like e. g.

> Which is one of the major problems with autocaps. Yes, you can have some 
> list of exceptions, but then you need a list of exceptions to the 
> exceptions.

This gets even more and more complicated if you want to do this for
all languages LyX supports.

>>> 2- The only way to check whether you have missed a capital is by loading all
>>> your lyx files on a text editor that supports regex and painfully check
>>> results of \.\s+[a-z] one by one. Not efficient.

LyX 2.0 will come with regexp-search.

>>> 3- I hate to do keyboard combos. they are bad for rsi and slower overall.
>>> Autocapitalization would save thousands of those a month.

However, there is a big difference whether you need to press
Alt-something or Shift-letter, as the latter is in a suitable place
(from the old typewriter days). 

Besides: in German, wherea all Nouns are capitalized, the Saving
would be about ten Percent maximum.

>>> say copy-paste from browsers. keeping basic formatting (headings, bold)
>>> would be good.,
...

> As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the 
> harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is 
> styled by CSS. Then what do you do?

Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
that the website uses "really good" markup (text with HTML markup
indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styled  and  soups.

With native HTML export, native HTML import seems like a logical
extension.

Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt  wrote:
> On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
>> The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
>> would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
>
> It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout
> editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either
> pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not
> much of a Qt type of guy).

It would be a useful feature to have and something that I've looked
for in the TeX/LaTeX environment for decades. Simple word processors
achieve it by allowing documents to be created as templates. So it is
a real shame that TeX has never had anything equivalent other than
trial and error.

> I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and
> character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...

Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?

> Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are so
> much simpler than LaTeX.

And doesn't Scribus (as a DTP package using XML) have a layout editor.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Rainer M Krug]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Trevor Jenkins wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Steve Litt 
> wrote:
> > On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
> >> The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
> >> would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
> >
> > It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout
> > editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either
> > pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm
> not
> > much of a Qt type of guy).
>
> It would be a useful feature to have and something that I've looked
> for in the TeX/LaTeX environment for decades. Simple word processors
> achieve it by allowing documents to be created as templates. So it is
> a real shame that TeX has never had anything equivalent other than
> trial and error.
>
> > I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments
> and
> > character styles might be to start a public collection of them. ...
>
> Don't we already have that with the CTAN archive? Why create a
> separate LyX one when the LaTeX part of CTAN already exists?
>
> > Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are
> so
> > much simpler than LaTeX.
>
> And doesn't Scribus (as a DTP package using XML) have a layout editor.
>

I agree that there are MANY different options for formating, but couldn't
one start with a basic layout editors, which only include a subset of the
formating options, namely the ones which are mainly used for paragraph
styles? In this case, one might be able to limit the number of formating
options to e.g. 10, and if further fine-tuning is necessaary, it needs to be
done by hand (in a kind of ert box in LyX) in the editor. Together with a
display on how the format would look, that would be brilliant.

Rainer


>
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>



-- 
NEW GERMAN FAX NUMBER!!!

Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation Biology,
UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany)

Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology
Natural Sciences Building
Office Suite 2039
Stellenbosch University
Main Campus, Merriman Avenue
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Cell:   +27 - (0)83 9479 042
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email:  rai...@krugs.de

Skype:  RMkrug
Google: r.m.k...@gmail.com

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/22/2010 10:52 PM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

It would appear that on Mar 22, Julio Rojas did say:

   

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.
 

Don't know much about that... I just use LyX, I don't really understand it
very well, so I'm not grasping the advantages of this "feature" ?

   
I would recommend learning about layouts, as that is where the real 
power of LyX lies.

The second one I miss, mostly because I'm not a native English speaker,
is online spell checking, but that is coming in 2.0.
 

Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
thinks I misspelled something.

   
It will do this if you turn on continuous spell-checking. It won't if 
you don't.



{or even worse silently replacing
misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
replacement word}

   

It will not do this.

rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/23/2010 05:22 AM, Guenter Milde wrote:

On 2010-03-22, rgheck wrote:
   


As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the
harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is
styled by CSS. Then what do you do?
 

Of course transform semantic markup to semantic markup.  This implies
that the website uses "really good" markup (text with HTML markup
indicating its logical structure), not CSS-styled  and  soups.

   
The difficulty is that HTML is very limited in what it is capable of 
marking, for the simple reason that there aren't very many tags. LyX 
character styles, for example, would almost uniformly correspond to 
"span", except for the handful of obvious exceptions. That, it seems to 
me, is why "use div and span for everything" has become almost the norm. 
See e.g. elyxer's HTML output. LyX's is more flexible, because it is 
specifiable in the layout. But the problem remains.


Richard

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Wolfgang Engelmann]

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run 
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters 
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it 
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those 
characters. 

I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I 
enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx document 
is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering 
reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very 
time consuming and frustrating. 

My solution now is to check after each new reference whether the pdf export is  
allright. That is cumbersome, but still faster than hunting for the offending 
characters after entering a big bunch of references.

It would be interesting to know, what kind of problems other people of this 
list do/did experience while working with lyx.

Wolfgang

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/23/2010 09:43 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:

Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not run
through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some characters
which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
characters.

I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I
enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx document
is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering
reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very
time consuming and frustrating.

   
I'd suggest reporting this to the JabRef folks. Perhaps they should have 
an option to save in something other than UTF-8, and even to convert 
illegal characters to LaTeX equivalents.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

btw, to those jabref users eyeing zotero for the fast ref capture who would
not use it because you had to export to bib first... the new FF addon LyZ
makes this on the fly. It's a killer feature, two clicks and you are done.
And your lib is on the cloud for free...
Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:02 PM, rgheck  wrote:

> On 03/23/2010 09:43 AM, Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
>
>> Considering the amount of time I had to spend in documents which did not
>> run
>> through LyX smoothly it had to do with references containing some
>> characters
>> which bothered the program. I realize that this is not Lyx's fault, but it
>> would be nice to have a feature (or an external prg) checking for those
>> characters.
>>
>> I am often searching in a data bank such as medline for references which I
>> enter into Jabref, my reference manager. Exporting it into the lyx
>> document
>> is easy, just a click on the lyx icon in Jabref, but finding the bothering
>> reference(s) after trying to export the pdf file is in my hands often very
>> time consuming and frustrating.
>>
>>
>>
> I'd suggest reporting this to the JabRef folks. Perhaps they should have an
> option to save in something other than UTF-8, and even to convert illegal
> characters to LaTeX equivalents.
>
> rh
>
>

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Pavel Sanda]

Steve Litt wrote:
> It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
> editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 

note that we did some specification already - year or two ago, just the coder
was not found ;) look on the archive if you want some inspiration.

pavel

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 3:28 AM, rgheck rgh...@bobjweil.com wrote:

  On 03/20/2010 09:23 PM, Jose Quesada wrote:
 
    1. incremental search
  Do you mean F3?

 no, I mean that as you type in the search box things that match get
 immediately active. No need to press enter, it works together with 'search
 highlight occurences'. the best way to experience this is to open vim, press
 / and start typing your search term. Word 2010 does this too (took them 10
 years :) )

A better example would be emacs (not trying to start an editors war).
And holding up any version of Word as an examplar is probably not
sensible. There are much more important things than incremental search
that have been waiting for resolution from Microsoft for much longer,
i. e. bug fixes.

   2. sentence autocapitalization
 
 
 
  Hmm. Most of us hate that.

Amen to that.

 Let me try to motivate this feature.
 1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.
 2- The only way to check whether you have missed a capital is by loading all
 your lyx files on a text editor that supports regex and painfully check
 results of \.\s+[a-z] one by one. Not efficient.
 3- I hate to do keyboard combos. they are bad for rsi and slower overall.
 Autocapitalization would save thousands of those a month.

What's wrong with pressing the Shift key as you type? That way you
have complete control of where capitalisation occurs. Those word
processors where it is enable by default make a piss poor attempt at.
And your regex hits things that are *not* sentence starts, e. g. this
example, which includes abbreviations e. g. like e. g.

Putting in autocapitisation simply shifts the responsibility from the
typist to the copy-editor. Better to do it right from the start than
to rely on some programmatic scheme that will not deal real
situations.


   5. bold, color background on outline. A way for the eyes to fixate
  landmarks
  in long outlines.
 
 
 
  I'm not sure what you mean here.
 
  say section is bold, subsection is not. Or colored backgrounds (level1 is
 darker, level 6 is lighter... etc).
 I'd love to assign colors to sections to be able to track them visually.

As someone with Meares-Irlan syndrome I see horrid cognitive effects
from such a feature.

   7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't (clipboard
  integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)

Actually most of the world operates on .doc format that doesn't make it right.

  I'm not sure which rest of the world you have in mind, but I agree that
  LyX's external clipboard handling could be improved. We generally use
  plaintext for this, because no-one has cared enough to change it since it
  was implemented eons ago.
 
 
 say copy-paste from browsers. keeping basic formatting (headings, bold)
 would be good., but I bet this is non-trivial. Running some html parser on
 clipboard contents, then convert html to lyx... then paste.

I don't do that in LyX but I've seen OpenOffice.org make a real hash
of pasting HTMLised text on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

   8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this
   and it's damn inspired)

Must be the only good featrure of OneNote then.

 
 
 
  Don't understand this either.
 
 
 Imagine you want to keep a snippet you found online. you copy it. when
 pasting it in lyx, it will add a little note with the url it came from, and
 the time it was collected. This is a killer feature for
 notetaking/research.

Um, you do your notetaking/research direct into LyX? Scrivener or
Journlr are a better tools for this task and allow the export of
entries to LaTeX for processing with LyX.

Regards, Trevor.

 Re: deemed!

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Olivier Ripoll]

Jose Quesada wrote:

Hi all,

In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...


Hi,

There are 2 points in your list for which our tastes diverge (and 
according to the thread, I'm not the only one).



2. sentence autocapitalization


I hate that. One of the first things I switch off in MS word. I have 
nothing against seeing it appear in LyX, but I would definitely hate not 
to be able to switch it off.



7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't (clipboard
integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


That is the most annoying feature I've seen appearing in 10 years. 
When using software offering this feature, I now must paste to a text 
editor, then copy it from here and finally paste to the target document 
(I'm not talking about LyX here).

Also, this would not be WYSIWYM, the main strength of LyX.

Best regards,

Olivier

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/22/2010 05:30 AM, Trevor Jenkins wrote:

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Jose Quesadaques...@gmail.com  wrote:
   


Let me try to motivate this feature.
1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.
2- The only way to check whether you have missed a capital is by loading all
your lyx files on a text editor that supports regex and painfully check
results of \.\s+[a-z] one by one. Not efficient.
3- I hate to do keyboard combos. they are bad for rsi and slower overall.
Autocapitalization would save thousands of those a month.
 

What's wrong with pressing the Shift key as you type? That way you
have complete control of where capitalisation occurs. Those word
processors where it is enable by default make a piss poor attempt at.
And your regex hits things that are *not* sentence starts, e. g. this
example, which includes abbreviations e. g. like e. g.

   
Which is one of the major problems with autocaps. Yes, you can have some 
list of exceptions, but then you need a list of exceptions to the 
exceptions.



say copy-paste from browsers. keeping basic formatting (headings, bold)
would be good., but I bet this is non-trivial. Running some html parser on
clipboard contents, then convert html to lyx... then paste.
 

I don't do that in LyX but I've seen OpenOffice.org make a real hash
of pasting HTMLised text on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

   
As he said, this is highly non-trivial. And the better the website, the 
harder it is, since a good website will use semantic markup that is 
styled by CSS. Then what do you do?


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/21/2010 10:14 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote:

Am 21.03.2010 22:12, schrieb Jose Quesada:


  2. sentence autocapitalization



Hmm. Most of us hate that.

Let me try to motivate this feature.
1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.


Indeed, we should let the users decide. Please open an enhancement 
report in our bug tracking system.


It is important to remember that this sort of feature is not cost-free, 
even if it can be turned off. It complicates the code and therefore 
makes maintenance more difficult.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/22/2010 06:50 AM, Olivier Ripoll wrote:

Jose Quesada wrote:

7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't 
(clipboard

integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


That is the most annoying feature I've seen appearing in 10 years. 
When using software offering this feature, I now must paste to a 
text editor, then copy it from here and finally paste to the target 
document (I'm not talking about LyX here).


I know this problem! I see it all the time when I try to paste from 
Firefox into Thunderbird, e.g.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

Hi Uwe, all,

  say section is bold, subsection is not. Or colored backgrounds (level1 is

 darker, level 6 is lighter... etc).
 I'd love to assign colors to sections to be able to track them visually.


 For this purpose we have layout files. Dependent on the document class,
you can there define how a  section should within LyX. The Additional
features manual explains the layout files.

This not a matter of altering the layout. I want the sidebar to change
color/font, not the text in the edit area. I don't think layouts control the
sidebar, right?


 The red arrow button jumps t the last cursor position.
 LyX supports 100 undo steps (accessible via shortcut Ctrl+z or the green,
 rounded, left-pointing arrow).


I want the cursor to jump to last edits (say at least 10) without having to
undo things.
That is, the functionality of the red arrow, but for all previous edits, not
only the last one. This works in mostly any text editor worth its salt.


   8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this

 and it's damn inspired)


  Imagine you want to keep a snippet you found online. you copy it. when
 pasting it in lyx, it will add a little note with the url it came from,
 and
 the time it was collected. This is a killer feature for
 notetaking/research.


 So what do you miss exactly? LyX has support for hyperlinks (to URLs,
 files, mail addresses).


Yes, as described above, I wanted something that would add the url to the
clipboard contents. That ff plugin does it. I wish it existed for chromium,
though, and that urls pasted became clickable...


 regards Uwe

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Pavel Sanda]

Maria Gouskova wrote:
 If this is implemented, I hope it is set to *off* by default--it's

for sure
pavel

Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Walter van Holst]

 Original Message 
Subject: Re: things that I miss in lyx
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0100
From: Walter van Holst walter.van.ho...@xs4all.nl
To: Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com

On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com
wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...
 
 1. incremental search
 
 2. sentence autocapitalization

As others have written, NO! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY, DON'T!

 3. grammar check (not crucial)

Grammar checks are non-trivial, it would be nice to have this in a modular
way so we can share this with other open source efforts in this field.


 4. search highlight occurences

Even nicer, the search implemented by Apple's Preview document viewer
provides a side bar with frequency bars of the search term's occurence on
each page.

 7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't
(clipboard
 integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)

Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
take
care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo
camper. Which I am not.

 8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this
 and
 it's damn inspired)

That sounds good. Some Zotero-like stuff might be helpful too.

Regards,

 Walter

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Abdelrazak Younes]

On 03/22/2010 01:20 PM, Jose Quesada wrote:

I want the cursor to jump to last edits (say at least 10) without having to
undo things.
That is, the functionality of the red arrow, but for all previous edits, not
only the last one. This works in mostly any text editor worth its salt.


I agree it would be useful to go back 2 or 3 step in edition but 10??!! 
I don't see how this could help you. I guess it should not be too hard 
to implement but I don't know if you'll find a developer for it... maybe 
you?



   8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this



and it's damn inspired)



  Imagine you want to keep a snippet you found online. you copy it. when

pasting it in lyx, it will add a little note with the url it came from,
and
the time it was collected. This is a killer feature for
notetaking/research.



So what do you miss exactly? LyX has support for hyperlinks (to URLs,
files, mail addresses).



Yes, as described above, I wanted something that would add the url to the
clipboard contents. That ff plugin does it. I wish it existed for chromium,
though, and that urls pasted became clickable...


I guess this is firefox that puts the URL _in_ the clipboard contents 
because the Clibpoard doesn't contain anything like that AFAIK. Is this 
html copying with the URL standardized? If so, that would be interesting 
to implement within LyX clipboard pasting mechanism.



Abdel.

PS: I guess that you are using LyX as a note taking program (I also do 
this) so I can understand some of your suggestions.

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Abdelrazak Younes]

On 03/22/2010 12:35 PM, rgheck wrote:

On 03/22/2010 06:50 AM, Olivier Ripoll wrote:

Jose Quesada wrote:


7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't
(clipboard
integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


That is the most annoying feature I've seen appearing in 10 years.
When using software offering this feature, I now must paste to a
text editor, then copy it from here and finally paste to the target
document (I'm not talking about LyX here).


I know this problem! I see it all the time when I try to paste from
Firefox into Thunderbird, e.g.


Me too! Even from Thunderbird to Thunderbird :-)

Hint: use Ctrl-Shift-V

Abdel.

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Uwe Stöhr]

Jose Quesada schrieb:

This not a matter of altering the layout. I want the sidebar to change 
color/font, not the text in the edit area.


OK, this is a different feature. You can add a further enhancement 
request but I fear that no developer will implement this soon.



I don't think layouts control the sidebar, right?


Yes.


The red arrow button jumps t the last cursor position.
LyX supports 100 undo steps (accessible via shortcut Ctrl+z or the
green, rounded, left-pointing arrow).

I want the cursor to jump to last edits (say at least 10) without having 
to undo things.


OK, tis is not yet possible.


Imagine you want to keep a snippet you found online. you copy
it. when
pasting it in lyx, it will add a little note with the url it
came from, and
the time it was collected. This is a killer feature for
notetaking/research.

So what do you miss exactly? LyX has support for hyperlinks (to
URLs, files, mail addresses).

Yes, as described above, I wanted something that would add the url to 
the clipboard contents. That ff plugin does it. I wish it existed for 
chromium, though, and that urls pasted became clickable... 


I still don't understand exactly what you mean. I don't know an ff 
plugin nor chromium.


If you copy text that contains an URL like this sentence:

Hello, http://www.lyx.org is cool.

and paste it into LyX, you only have to highlight the URL in LyX and 
press the hyperlink toolbar button. This creates a clickable hyperlink.
The hyperlink cannot be opened from within LyX but from the preview. We 
had a discussion about this and if I remember correctly, we decided to 
do this because of security reasons. While thinking about this, it 
doesn't make much sense because you already can open external material 
like images from within LyX.
Can you therefore ask on the lyx-devel mailing list if LyX could allow 
to open hyperlinks also from within LyX. Implementing this should be 
easy but i want to hear some other opinions first.


thanks and regards
Uwe

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Graham Smith]

Jose


Yes, as described above, I wanted something that would add the url to the
clipboard contents. That ff plugin does it. I wish it existed for chromium,
though, and that urls pasted became clickable...


Have you googled for a chromium extension?  A quick google here 
suggested a several possibilities.


Not the clickable URLS of course !

Graham

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Jose Quesada]

Graham,

I couldn't find anything. Can you post your findings here?

Best,
-Jose

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute,
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/
http://twitter.com/Quesada


On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Graham Smith graham.sm...@myotis.co.ukwrote:

 Jose


  Yes, as described above, I wanted something that would add the url to the
 clipboard contents. That ff plugin does it. I wish it existed for
 chromium,
 though, and that urls pasted became clickable...


 Have you googled for a chromium extension?  A quick google here suggested a
 several possibilities.

 Not the clickable URLS of course !

 Graham

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Graham Smith]

Jose



I couldn't find anything. Can you post your findings here?


Mmmm, not really as I'm not especially interested and didn't keep any 
records, but the add ons for Chrome searched from within Chrome came up 
with something called multiclip, plus a couple of others


And Clipboard manager and chromium seemed to throw up several options.

Graham

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Guenter Milde]

On 2010-03-22, Walter van Holst wrote:
 On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com
 wrote:


 7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't
(clipboard integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses
formatting)

 Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
 point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
 take
 care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
 braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo
 camper. Which I am not.

Sorry, but HTML has (or can be used for) a semantic markup in a quite
comparable way. So, keeping sections, links, emphasized text, quotes,
... *as an option* would be an enhancement.

Günter

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 22 March 2010 08:51:55 Walter van Holst wrote:
  Original Message 
 Subject: Re: things that I miss in lyx
 Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0100
 From: Walter van Holst walter.van.ho...@xs4all.nl
 To: Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com
 
 On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com
 
 wrote:
  Hi all,
 
  In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...
 
  1. incremental search
 
  2. sentence autocapitalization
 
 As others have written, NO! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY, DON'T!

++
 
  3. grammar check (not crucial)
[clip] 
  4. search highlight occurences
[clip]
  7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't
 
 (clipboard
 
  integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)
 
 Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
 point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
 take
 care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
 braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo
 camper. Which I am not.
+=65535

What could be grosser than having the source's fingerpainting auto-inserted in 
your styles-based LyX doc?

I'd like to take a second to back up a couple levels of abstraction, from 
features to priorities. My priorities in LyX are:

* Ability to write long documents fast and easily
* Styles based authoring

Believe it or not, aesthetic typesetting isn't one of my priorities. My books 
written in WordPerfect 5.1 and MS Word were easily good enough when it came to 
typesetting. After all, my books are a mail order product.

If I wanted to write short docs I'd use Abiword or OpenOffice, kompozer or 
Vim. If I didn't care about styles based authoring I'd use OpenOffice.

I think priorities determine the need for features. Given my priorities, 
character styles was far and away the best feature addition in the last 10 
years. Another great feature is LyX's ability to almost instantly manipulate 
100,000 word documents -- good algorithms implemented right. Outline view was 
a good addition and will be even better when it can be used to add nodes. 
Outline view is a big timesaver. I imagine Layout Modules would be a big 
timesaver but haven't learned to use them yet.

One of the biggest consumers of time when I use LyX is adding and tweaking 
styles, both paragraph (environments) and character. Getting a LyX style to do 
what you want is about 2 orders of magnitude more time consuming than the same 
thing in WP 5.1 or MS Word. That would probably go up to an order of magnitude 
of 3 for a LyX newbie. This can't be helped -- LaTeX is more complex and less 
obvious than WP5.1 or MSWord layout, but it can be addressed through a 
combination of:

1) Documentation
2) Easy to browse and search repository of styles to which we all contribute

Sentence autocapitalization might be somewhat of a time saver if the subject 
matter always has a capital following a period and whitespace. But for code-
rich docs, it would slow you down immensely. As far as special kinds of 
searches, LyX's algorithm design and implementation is so good that you can 
brute force search almost instantly, so what's the need?

This paragraph is my opinion -- your mileage may vary. In my opinion LyX is a 
tool to be used in a very narrow set of circumstances -- long document writing 
where consistency is a priority (hence styles), and good typesetting is a 
priority, and table of contents and indices just work. I'd never use it for a 
poster -- Inkscape does posters better. I'd never use it to create a web page 
-- Kompozer is much better at that (exception: When a whole web subsite must 
have consistency and is the equivalent of a document). I wouldn't use it for a 
five page document -- OpenOffice and AbiWord are much easier for that, whether 
you're doing fingerpainting or limited styles-based. To me, adding features 
like autocap and especially rich/XML paste would be trying to make LyX into a 
tool it's not -- like putting a file on the side of a hammer.

I think the decision of what features to add is all about what one does with 
LyX, and one's priorities in using LyX.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Julio Rojas]

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition. The
second one I miss, mostly because I'm not a native English speaker, is
online spell checking, but that is coming in 2.0.

Again, I have to give my most sincere thanks to all developers. Lyx is
a wonderful tool even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep
laughing at me for using it. :D
-
Julio Rojas
jcredbe...@gmail.com



On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Steve Litt sl...@troubleshooters.com wrote:
 On Monday 22 March 2010 08:51:55 Walter van Holst wrote:
  Original Message 
 Subject: Re: things that I miss in lyx
 Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0100
 From: Walter van Holst walter.van.ho...@xs4all.nl
 To: Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com

 On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com

 wrote:
  Hi all,
 
  In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...
 
  1. incremental search
 
  2. sentence autocapitalization

 As others have written, NO! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY, DON'T!

 ++

  3. grammar check (not crucial)
 [clip]
  4. search highlight occurences
 [clip]
  7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't

 (clipboard

  integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)

 Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
 point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
 take
 care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
 braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo
 camper. Which I am not.
 +=65535

 What could be grosser than having the source's fingerpainting auto-inserted in
 your styles-based LyX doc?

 I'd like to take a second to back up a couple levels of abstraction, from
 features to priorities. My priorities in LyX are:

 * Ability to write long documents fast and easily
 * Styles based authoring

 Believe it or not, aesthetic typesetting isn't one of my priorities. My books
 written in WordPerfect 5.1 and MS Word were easily good enough when it came to
 typesetting. After all, my books are a mail order product.

 If I wanted to write short docs I'd use Abiword or OpenOffice, kompozer or
 Vim. If I didn't care about styles based authoring I'd use OpenOffice.

 I think priorities determine the need for features. Given my priorities,
 character styles was far and away the best feature addition in the last 10
 years. Another great feature is LyX's ability to almost instantly manipulate
 100,000 word documents -- good algorithms implemented right. Outline view was
 a good addition and will be even better when it can be used to add nodes.
 Outline view is a big timesaver. I imagine Layout Modules would be a big
 timesaver but haven't learned to use them yet.

 One of the biggest consumers of time when I use LyX is adding and tweaking
 styles, both paragraph (environments) and character. Getting a LyX style to do
 what you want is about 2 orders of magnitude more time consuming than the same
 thing in WP 5.1 or MS Word. That would probably go up to an order of magnitude
 of 3 for a LyX newbie. This can't be helped -- LaTeX is more complex and less
 obvious than WP5.1 or MSWord layout, but it can be addressed through a
 combination of:

 1) Documentation
 2) Easy to browse and search repository of styles to which we all contribute

 Sentence autocapitalization might be somewhat of a time saver if the subject
 matter always has a capital following a period and whitespace. But for code-
 rich docs, it would slow you down immensely. As far as special kinds of
 searches, LyX's algorithm design and implementation is so good that you can
 brute force search almost instantly, so what's the need?

 This paragraph is my opinion -- your mileage may vary. In my opinion LyX is a
 tool to be used in a very narrow set of circumstances -- long document writing
 where consistency is a priority (hence styles), and good typesetting is a
 priority, and table of contents and indices just work. I'd never use it for a
 poster -- Inkscape does posters better. I'd never use it to create a web page
 -- Kompozer is much better at that (exception: When a whole web subsite must
 have consistency and is the equivalent of a document). I wouldn't use it for a
 five page document -- OpenOffice and AbiWord are much easier for that, whether
 you're doing fingerpainting or limited styles-based. To me, adding features
 like autocap and especially rich/XML paste would be trying to make LyX into a
 tool it's not -- like putting a file on the side of a hammer.

 I think the decision of what features to add is all about what one does with
 LyX, and one's priorities in using LyX.

 SteveT

 Steve Litt
 Recession Relief Package
 http://www.recession-relief.US
 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[rgheck]

On 03/22/2010 05:43 PM, Julio Rojas wrote:

The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.

   
This has been discussed often, and I don't know how hard it would be, 
either. I actually suspect that getting something basic working wouldn't 
take much work at all. By basic, I mean: Something that would look like 
a database editor, with lots of combo boxes, text boxes, and the like, 
where you could choose things for the various legal tags. It would load 
a layout file for you, and then you could choose stuff to modify. When 
you were done, it would write the file out. The reading code is of 
course there. The writing code is not. Most of the work would go into 
defining the options, which ones are allowed in which cases, etc. I'm 
not even sure what sort of data structure one would want to use for that.


As a bonus, though this would be a *bit* harder, LyX could show you what 
your new style would look like. Even this wouldn't be too hard, though, 
because of embeddable work areas, such as will be used in the advanced 
search and replace feature. These are little windows that work exactly 
like document windows, except that they don't represent the contents of 
documents. The display one would presumably be marked read-only and show 
some standard example text.


rh

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Hellmut Weber]

Am 22.03.2010 18:36, schrieb Steve Litt:

On Monday 22 March 2010 08:51:55 Walter van Holst wrote:

 Original Message 
Subject: Re: things that I miss in lyx
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0100
From: Walter van Holstwalter.van.ho...@xs4all.nl
To: Jose Quesadaques...@gmail.com

On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesadaques...@gmail.com

wrote:

Hi all,

In no special order, things that I miss in lyx...

1. incremental search

2. sentence autocapitalization


As others have written, NO! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY, DON'T!


++



3. grammar check (not crucial)

[clip]

4. search highlight occurences

[clip]

7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't


(clipboard


integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)


Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole
point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX
take
care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally
braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo
camper. Which I am not.

+=65535

What could be grosser than having the source's fingerpainting auto-inserted in
your styles-based LyX doc?

I'd like to take a second to back up a couple levels of abstraction, from
features to priorities. My priorities in LyX are:

* Ability to write long documents fast and easily
* Styles based authoring

Believe it or not, aesthetic typesetting isn't one of my priorities. My books
written in WordPerfect 5.1 and MS Word were easily good enough when it came to
typesetting. After all, my books are a mail order product.

If I wanted to write short docs I'd use Abiword or OpenOffice, kompozer or
Vim. If I didn't care about styles based authoring I'd use OpenOffice.

I think priorities determine the need for features. Given my priorities,
character styles was far and away the best feature addition in the last 10
years. Another great feature is LyX's ability to almost instantly manipulate
100,000 word documents -- good algorithms implemented right. Outline view was
a good addition and will be even better when it can be used to add nodes.
Outline view is a big timesaver. I imagine Layout Modules would be a big
timesaver but haven't learned to use them yet.

One of the biggest consumers of time when I use LyX is adding and tweaking
styles, both paragraph (environments) and character. Getting a LyX style to do
what you want is about 2 orders of magnitude more time consuming than the same
thing in WP 5.1 or MS Word. That would probably go up to an order of magnitude
of 3 for a LyX newbie. This can't be helped -- LaTeX is more complex and less
obvious than WP5.1 or MSWord layout, but it can be addressed through a
combination of:

1) Documentation
2) Easy to browse and search repository of styles to which we all contribute

Sentence autocapitalization might be somewhat of a time saver if the subject
matter always has a capital following a period and whitespace. But for code-
rich docs, it would slow you down immensely. As far as special kinds of
searches, LyX's algorithm design and implementation is so good that you can
brute force search almost instantly, so what's the need?

This paragraph is my opinion -- your mileage may vary. In my opinion LyX is a
tool to be used in a very narrow set of circumstances -- long document writing
where consistency is a priority (hence styles), and good typesetting is a
priority, and table of contents and indices just work. I'd never use it for a
poster -- Inkscape does posters better. I'd never use it to create a web page
-- Kompozer is much better at that (exception: When a whole web subsite must
have consistency and is the equivalent of a document). I wouldn't use it for a
five page document -- OpenOffice and AbiWord are much easier for that, whether
you're doing fingerpainting or limited styles-based. To me, adding features
like autocap and especially rich/XML paste would be trying to make LyX into a
tool it's not -- like putting a file on the side of a hammer.
I would like to present my experiences which are somewhat different from 
Steve's:


I'm using LyX for *all* sorts of documents, preferably rather short ones 
5 - 10 pages. For me the consistency of a large set of shorter documents 
is the crucial point (may be around 150 different papres which have 
accumulated over the years)


So I have spent some time in defining my special layouts for e.g. 
official documents for my business as management consultant, different 
letter templates for my bussiness, private letter, private letters of my 
wife and so on.


I have to admit that I have some knowledge of LaTeX from past activities.

And once I have a template for some type of document I don't have to 
think about layout any more.


I have been obliged to use word for several years and had two 
opportunities to migrate a set of documents with a specific company 
layout to a new word version (not to speak about the joy to buy

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Mar 22, Julio Rojas did say:

 The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
 would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.

Don't know much about that... I just use LyX, I don't really understand it
very well, so I'm not grasping the advantages of this feature ?

 The second one I miss, mostly because I'm not a native English speaker,
 is online spell checking, but that is coming in 2.0.

Oh Gawd no! That is if I understand you to mean that it will check my
spelling as I type, and interrupt my creative flow to inform me that it
thinks I misspelled something. {or even worse silently replacing
misspelled or unknown words with what it thinks is the best matching
replacement word} No, I much prefer it wait for me to tell it I'm ready
for such a distraction. {by pressing F7} So I sincerely hope and pray
that if that's what you mean by online spellchecking that they make it
easy to totally disable it...

What I'd find useful might be that it kept track of which (chapters,
parts, sections, etc... I'd modified during a sessioni, and if the last
modification wasn't a spellcheck operation, then inform me with a dialog
box on output, manual file save, file close, or program quit, that there
are modified (sections etc...) that have not been spell checked, And would I
like to spell check {just those modified sections, chapters etc...) first.
I note that any of the above (with the possible exception of the manual
save) would tend to indicate that the creative flow of content has
already been interrupted when I decided I wanted to see what the finished
product looked like or chose to close the file or quit LyX...
This would of course imply that there would be a spellcheck option to
spell check all modified sections, chapters etc... on command. Probably
this would be a difficult thing to implement. So I sure don't expect to
see it in LyX or even something like OO.o, any time soon. But, it'd be
much more welcome than shudder checking my spelling as I type...
 
 Again, I have to give my most sincere thanks to all developers. Lyx is
 a wonderful tool...

On that I think we agree! ;-)

 ...even if my WinEdt addict friends at the lab keep laughing at me for
 using it. :D

In the long run, I think the joke's on them...

-- 
|   ---   ___
|   0   - Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|   ^  J(tWdy)P
|~\___/~  jtw...@ttlc.net

Re: Fwd: Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 22 March 2010 17:43:10 Julio Rojas wrote:
 The only feature I miss is a layout editor. I don't know how easy
 would it be to program one, but that would be one good addition.

It's hard Julio. It's hard enough that I couldn't even *specify* a layout 
editor, though I tried. If I'd been able to specify one, I'd have either 
pestered the LyX crew to write it, or written it myself in Perl/Tk (I'm not 
much of a Qt type of guy).

I'm thinking the best way to address the difficulty of new environments and 
character styles might be to start a public collection of them. A person could 
start with something close to what he wants and tweak it til it's right. Such 
a collection could come with a supporting document that organizes various 
environments and character styles in a hierarchy so that what you need is 
easily findable.

Wordperfect and MSWord have layout editors of sorts, but their tags are so 
much simpler than LaTeX.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt

Re: things that I miss in lyx

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Jose Quesada ques...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 3:28 AM, rgheck rgh...@bobjweil.com wrote:

  On 03/20/2010 09:23 PM, Jose Quesada wrote:
 
    1. incremental search
  Do you mean F3?

 no, I mean that as you type in the search box things that match get
 immediately active. No need to press enter, it works together with 'search
 highlight occurences'. the best way to experience this is to open vim, press
 / and start typing your search term. Word 2010 does this too (took them 10
 years :) )

A better example would be emacs (not trying to start an editors war).
And holding up any version of Word as an examplar is probably not
sensible. There are much more important things than incremental search
that have been waiting for resolution from Microsoft for much longer,
i. e. bug fixes.

   2. sentence autocapitalization
 
 
 
  Hmm. Most of us hate that.

Amen to that.

 Let me try to motivate this feature.
 1- It's trivial to implement it, and then make it optional.
 2- The only way to check whether you have missed a capital is by loading all
 your lyx files on a text editor that supports regex and painfully check
 results of \.\s+[a-z] one by one. Not efficient.
 3- I hate to do keyboard combos. they are bad for rsi and slower overall.
 Autocapitalization would save thousands of those a month.

What's wrong with pressing the Shift key as you type? That way you
have complete control of where capitalisation occurs. Those word
processors where it is enable by default make a piss poor attempt at.
And your regex hits things that are *not* sentence starts, e. g. this
example, which includes abbreviations e. g. like e. g.

Putting in autocapitisation simply shifts the responsibility from the
typist to the copy-editor. Better to do it right from the start than
to rely on some programmatic scheme that will not deal real
situations.


   5. bold, color background on outline. A way for the eyes to fixate
  landmarks
  in long outlines.
 
 
 
  I'm not sure what you mean here.
 
  say section is bold, subsection is not. Or colored backgrounds (level1 is
 darker, level 6 is lighter... etc).
 I'd love to assign colors to sections to be able to track them visually.

As someone with Meares-Irlan syndrome I see horrid cognitive effects
from such a feature.

   7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't (clipboard
  integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting)

Actually most of the world operates on .doc format that doesn't make it right.

  I'm not sure which rest of the world you have in mind, but I agree that
  LyX's external clipboard handling could be improved. We generally use
  plaintext for this, because no-one has cared enough to change it since it
  was implemented eons ago.
 
 
 say copy-paste from browsers. keeping basic formatting (headings, bold)
 would be good., but I bet this is non-trivial. Running some html parser on
 clipboard contents, then convert html to lyx... then paste.

I don't do that in LyX but I've seen OpenOffice.org make a real hash
of pasting HTMLised text on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

   8. 'pasted from' and url for every paste from the web (onenote uses this
   and it's damn inspired)

Must be the only good featrure of OneNote then.

 
 
 
  Don't understand this either.
 
 
 Imagine you want to keep a snippet you found online. you copy it. when
 pasting it in lyx, it will add a little note with the url it came from, and
 the time it was collected. This is a killer feature for
 notetaking/research.

Um, you do your notetaking/research direct into LyX? Scrivener or
Journlr are a better tools for this task and allow the export of
entries to LaTeX for processing with LyX.

Regards, Trevor.

 Re: deemed!