Darren Freeman wrote:
> Secondly, the learning curve is quite steep! Try explaining to somebody that
> the "right" way to type one-point-five-five-microns is to press {C-m, "1.55",
> "\ ", "\mu", " ", C-m, "m"}. They want to know why they can't just insert a
> mu where they want it like in a "real" word processor. Then they accept it as
> an experiment and want to know how the hell you worked it out.
>
Insertion of Greek characters can be done directly. It depends upon your
keyboard, input methods, and the like. There's a movement afoot to make
it more like it used to be. See here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org/msg114662.html
That said, part of the way you work it out is to RTFM, which, granted,
people hate to do. Of course that's why 99% of the people who use Word
use it wrongly and have no idea what 98% of the features are.
Don't forget that you also get to do this:
\newcommand\micron{\ \mu \textnormal{m}}
As a math macro of course.
> I think it is very important for any features exposed at the UI level to
> work in the most intuitive way possible.
Though it's a tribute to Microsoft's market dominance, to be sure, that
the way Word does it essentially defines what is "intuitive" for many
people, it just doesn't follow that the way Word does it is the best
way. Certainly the LyX developers don't subscribe to that attitude. If
learning to use LyX involves un-learning a lot of what one thought one
knew, well, that's just how it is. Bad habits die hard.
That said, there are undoubtedly improvements that can be made to the
UI, and there are plenty of bugs still to be fixed.
> Remember when you were young
> and taught yourself to use a computer.. you pushed everything to see
> what it did. Most people are afraid of doing that after a number of
> unexpected and counter-intuitive results. That's one reason I think
> those "Cancel" buttons should be renamed to "Close" by 1.5.0 since
> "Cancel" has a well-understood meaning of "undo all the changes I made
> to this dialog", which encourages experimentation. But when it doesn't
> undo the changes... that violates trust like only data loss can.
>
Point taken. Please remind me which dialogs had this problem.
Richard
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