On 02/29/2012 01:41 PM, Pascal Fischer wrote:
On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Richard Heck<[email protected]> wrote:
The other issue here is "give a man a fish" vs "teach him how to fish". I'd
rather teach people how to fish. It's not hard to do the sort of thing you
describe, and the way to do it is described in some detail in one of the
manuals.
But then you could also say: remove the margin-settings and teach the
people how to do that by hand. Or the document-classes, and so on.
It wouldn't trouble me, actually, if the margin settings vanished. But
my real point was that page headers and footers are more complicated
objects than ordinary users might suspect. One really shouldn't think in
terms just of how to place the page number, though in some cases that is
all that is involved. And for that case, as I said, it would be easy
enough to write a little module that handled this. It would do nothing
but load fancyhdr and write certain stuff to the preamble. This is one
of the things that's nice about modules. They make certain aspects of
LyX's behavior extensible, sometimes in little ways, sometimes in bigger
ways.
I can certainly imagine a GUI for constructing the headers and footers,
and LibreOffice does offer something like this, though not with the sort
of flexibility LaTeX offers. It would be a whole lot of work, though,
for what seems to me minimal gain, to write such a thing that actually
harnessed the power of fancyhdr. But if someone wants to write it....
Actually, that might not be so hard. I think Uwe once experimented, at
least, with a module that allowed one to use LyX to write the fancyhdr
commands. If one extended InsetInfo with things like \thepage, then you
might not have to use much ERT, even.
I totally agree with advanced features, but the meaning of Lyx is to
make LaTeX usable for those who don't learn it - at least the basic
features and I think the position of the page number is basic.
I guess I see it as less basic, and as something that shouldn't really
be addressed as a one-off thing. There's a "German letter" class that
formats letters in accordance with German style. If there's a need for a
"German article" class for simple articles, then that, we seem to agree,
is really where this should be addressed.
Richard
