Moritz Moeller-Herrmann wrote: > Angus Leeming wrote: > >> Moritz Moeller-Herrmann wrote: > >>> I am now using lyx-1.3-pre2 for my dissertation and it looks great >>> so far. Is there any possibility to turn on preview-latex for the >>> footnotes? It seems to work in Emacs. > >> I don't see a problem. Attached is a screenshot. Works both when >> typing a new equation and when loading an existing file. > > The attached picture shows a formula in a footnote. I have never > tried this, because I am jurist. > > I am talking about the possibility to preview the footnotemark. It > is mentioned in the preview-latex manual here: > http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net/manual/Package-options.html#Package%20options > "This makes footnotes render as previews, and only as their footnote > symbol. A convenient editing feature inside of Emacs." > > It seems as if you can set \usepackage[footnotes]{preview} in Emacs > and have a preview of the footnote mark.
It would appear that you are coming up against a philosophical impasse. David Kastrup thinks that previews are a good, good thing. That may be because he uses emacs to write his LaTeX documents. He /wants/ to see his LaTeX as code and he would also like to see what the resulting compiled code results in. The LyX project was set up to get you away from LaTeX code and give you a reasonable on-screen representation of your document. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking preview-latex. After all, I spent a large chunk of my summer trying to get it to work in LyX. It's just that, having done so, I'm not sure what /real/ benefit these previews provide for most people. We integrated preview-latex into LyX because it can sometimes provide the user with useful information not otherwise available to him. If LyX's math editor can rendor the equation, then the preview is little more than eye candy. The real beneficiaries are those who write things like commutative diagrams that mathed can't currently render. Ditto, those who include LaTeX images in their document will find this gizmo useful. LyX uses a little box saying "foot" (possibly translated) to show a footnote. Would you write better documents if LyX displayed some symbol or other? I doubt it. Sure, we /could/ do it, at the cost of complicating the code (read introduce more bugs). However, I suspect that we'd rather spend out limited time in other ways. On a more practical level, the only way to get this right is to make LyX aware of the footnote symbols. If we were to show the symbol on the footnote box, then using preview-latex is just a kludge. Inserting a new footnote between existing ones will change the symbol for all subsequent footnotes. It seems like a huge overkill to regenerate all these images. Indded, what happens if you use a footnote package that displayed footnotes as numbers starting from 1 on each new page? Should LyX know what text fits on which page? Of course not. This is a can of worms that I will not open. Just my opinions of course ;-) -- Angus
