I am a professor of mathematics who has been using Scientific Word intensively for many years.
Been there, switched to Lyx.
One of the really magnificent features of Scientific Word is "automatic substitution".
I personally do not miss that feature because it is supposed to be used to type long sentenses with its names, but I do not have them. What I need were customizable shortcuts to enter single math characters, and lyx excels at it. We are planning to add a shortcut dialog that make customization of shortcut much easier. We may also consider adding this feature because it can be useful and does not sound too difficult.
Also it is easy to remember what my "words" for invoking each macro are. I can choose logical names.
Agreed.
Clearly there is some subtle reason which prevents these two programs from working properly together. And this is a GREAT SHAME.
GREAT SHAME of AutoHotKey? If ever autohotkey can feed the right keystokes to lyx, lyx should work as expected.
It might be still easier for you to include "automatic substitution" directly in Lyx, i.e. with the option of invoking macros by typing
Your feature goes to the realm of automatic correction. I was infuriated by such a feature in word when it kept changing i to I. I turned off this feature and later one tossed off word for its other clever features. We certainly need some careful thoughts if we are going to add this feature.
In Lyx, when the cursor is moved to be within a region of the text which is a mathematics formula, the exact extent of that rectangular region is indicated by four purple "corner markers". For various purposes it is highly desirable to to be able to see the exact location and extent of the "formula region" also when the cursor is outside that region. Thus I strongly suggest offering the option (I think it should even be the default) that the background colour of all the formula regions should always be different from the background colour of the rest of the screen, no matter where the cursor currently is.
Tool -> preference -> color -> math background? Cheers, Bo
