Hooray! The new version of mutt allows me to Reply to a message within the
lyx-devel digest! That means I'll be even more verbose from now on. (I know
that's just what people were waiting for.)
On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 05:00:13PM +0900, R. Lahaye wrote:
>
> I now realize that part of the confusion was the arrangement
> of the entries and that some entries appear twice in the menus.
I and others have squawked about things like this over the past couple
years. We definitely need to rework things.
> *) Table insert appears twice in the menus:
> Edit->Table->Insert Table
> Insert->Table
> The first one should go to keep things simple and logical!
I think I complained about this like a year ago. Someone had an explanation
for why we weren't allowed to get rid of it, but I don't know what it was.
Having a nested menu with just one entry is pretty silly, even if it's not
double.
> The possible new layout of the menus:
>
> File-> (unchanged, only move the "view/update dvi" and
> "view/update postscript" to the new "View" entry).
Maybe version control belongs in File? You're not really editing the
document per se when you check it in/out. Btw, I wish there were a "check in
and out" (equivalent to ci -l) since very often you want to check in
changes you've made but keep writing.
> Edit->Undo
> ----
> Paste Primary selection as text
> Paste Primary selection as paragraphs
Why don't these go directly under the Paste entry? (Because they're much
more rarely used?) If this is actually to paste in stuff you get from a
different application, why isn't it under Insert, like Import_Ascii_File? I
don't know if you could get away with putting Paste_Selection under Import,
but I don't really think it belongs in Edit.
No, wait. Import_Ascii_File shouldn't be under Insert, because it's already
under File->Import! (Or do these two commands have different functions?)
> Goto->References->...
> Table Of Contents->...
> List Of Figures->...
> List Of Tables->...
> List Of Algorithms->...
The "List" names should be changed, IMO. Why not "Goto->Figure->" etc. ?
(Even TOC could be changed to "Goto->Section->" but maybe TOC makes more
sense in that case.)
If you want to be really radical, get rid of the Documents menu and have a
Goto->Document submenu. I mean, why not?
> Note
Using the first few words of the note as the menu entry? I'm not 100%
convinced this would be useful, but maybe.
> Go Back
Yes!
Btw, if we wanted to be hip, we could call the menu "Navigate" instead of
Goto.
> View->Dvi
> Update dvi
> Postscript
> Update Postscript
Note that viewing dvi and updating dvi aren't really that similar. That is,
view dvi means the user wants to look at the actual dvi, which clearly
belongs in the view menu. Update dvi means the user wants to run LaTeX,
which isn't necessarily the same thing. But I admit I don't know where else
you'd put it. (I use the run_Latex button in the toolbar, myself :)
> Math-> (unchanged)
I and possibly others have mentioned that we should get rid of the
first six entries in this menu. Once we've done that, there are only three
entries in the menu. Maybe we should get rid of it? Let's see.... How about
putting the stuff into the Insert menu. Certainly Math_Panel and Math_mode
belong there. Also Display, in the sense that it inserts a display equation.
I guess the fact that it toggles displaymode/inline doesn't exactly belong
in Insert, but I don't think it's worth having a whole top-level menu for
just 3 entries.
> Options-> (unchanged)
Hm. This menu is also pretty small, and JMarc has recently shrunk it even
more by removing LaTeX. [Thinking....] OK! Now that we've taken all that
stuff out of the Edit menu, why not change Options to Edit->Preferences.
(1) It gets rid of a top level menu, which is always a good thing to do as
long as it doesn't make things more confusing.
(2) I think a lot of people expect Preferences to be in the Edit menu.
The really really bad news about all of this is that it requires a major
overhaul of the Tutorial -- which *has* to be up to date since it's the
introduction to LyX for a lot of people -- the User Guide, and Extended.
Plus all the translations of all these files! (Not even to mention the
Reference, which is already out of date.) Nonetheless, I think it's pretty
important to do this, and it definitely wouldn't hurt us to reread the docs
and see if they still make sense.
-Amir
