Dear Norbert, Thank you very much for your detailed comments. I am not currently working on these parts of TeXmacs now, but I will keep these points in mind when coming back to those points.
Only 4 would be relatively easy to implement, but it is not completely clear to me how to deal with the multiparagraph stuff in tables, so I will have to think more about it. Notice that "return" also moves to the first column, contrary to A-down. Best wishes, Joris On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 12:24:02PM +0200, Norbert Nemec wrote: > over the past few weeks I have been using TeXmacs extensively for > preparing slides for an important talk. From that, I gathered a number > of experiences that i would like to share. Several of these things have > probably been discussed before. Still several weeks of power-usage might > put them into a new perspective. > > First, the general impression: > > TeXmacs definitely is fit for demanding production use. There is room > for improvement in details, but apart from that, TeXmacs definitely is a > mature environment to do real work. > > Now as for the several aspects where I see room for improvement: > > 1) Positioning of elements > > preparing slides means arranging pictures, text, formulas and graphical > elements onto a page. For this it would be a huge improvement to have > floating elements that can be freely positioned on the page using the > mouse. What I imagine is a floating box element that is anchored > somewhere in the text, has a position either relative to the anchor > itself, contains arbitrary multiparagraph content and can be moved and > resized freely by mouse. It should be simply layered on top or below the > other content without influencing the flow of other elements. > > 2) Indication of table layout with by viewing "grid lines" > > When moving through a document with the cursor, you always nicely see > the light cyan or purple lines of text regions that you have entered. I > would propose one simple but extremely helpful extension to this: > > When entering a table with the cursor, there should not only be a solid > line around the whole table, but a grid of dashed lines between all the > cells of this table. > > 3) Behavior of multiparagraph content in table cells > > lacking a way to freely position elements, I instead used tables to do > the page layout, making extensive use of multiparagraph cells. > > Unfortunately, multiparagraph text in a cell is limited to compared to > regular text in several respects: > > * you cannot align individual paragraphs (left, right, centered, block) > with respect to the width of the cell > * elements that usually span the paragraph width (like equation, hrule > or sub-tables set to span paragraph width) do not adjust to the width of > the surrounding cell but still have the full width of the page. > > 4) Pressing <return> inside a table cell > > Currently, when you press <return> inside a regular (not > multi-paragraph) cell, it does the same as <Alt>-<down>. Instead, I > would propose to make it automatically convert the cell to > multi-paragraph and work within the cell. Maybe, this is a matter of > taste, but for my working habits, this would make a lot of sense: why do > you need two different key-combinations for creating new rows? Why > should you dig through menus to make cells multi-paragraph? (Or is there > another simple way to switch a cell to multi-paragraph that I missed?) > > 5) adding markup for multiple paragraphs > > Do the following: > * mark a single word > * press <backslash> > * type "bf" > * press <return> > > This works perfectly not only for "bf" but many other kinds of markup > (also "with" and others) > > Now try this: > * mark two consecutive paragraphs > * press <backslash> > -> the marking is ignored!!! > > Why doesn't this very convenient way of adding markup work for more than > one paragraph? > > ------------------ > > So much for now. There were other points as well, but the most important > things are said. > > Greetings, and thanks again for creating TeXmacs. It really worked great > for me, and I can only hope that this report may help improving it even > further. > > Norbert _______________________________________________ Texmacs-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev
