"Dr Dave" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I am not on a Lyx-bashing spree here, but simply giving you my thoughts as a > first-time user who has relevant background and experience in industry as > well as science and technology.
Very good. > I expected this introductory document to be a finely-honed work of > perfection with the purpose of not only aiding the new user in becoming > familiar with Lyx, but to convince him of the correctness of choosing Lyx. The Intro is certainly not perfect. Did you read the Tutorial too? > My first "bad experience" with Lyx was the inability to display matching > "double quotes", as the colloquial jargon calls them. You can see on the > attached IMG01 that a different character is being used for the opening and > closing quotation symbols; really, I would not expect to see such a faux pas > in either the document or the Lyx application at less than five minutes > out-of-the-box. Last time I checked, quotes in English language were not symmetrical (as in most languages, actually). > In addition, for whatever reason, I see inconsistent indentation behavior > for Standard style. For example, the first Standard paragraph following a > Subsection is flush-left, but each subsequent Standard paragraph is indented > 5 spaces. What kind of style convention is that? How can a "set style" > possibly be allowed to have two different behaviors? This is a feature of the particular document class (the standard LaTeX one). Other classes make different typographical choices. > And, how about missing characters (or maybe it is a character that should be > removed)? I see a closing parenthesis with no opening parenthesis. Take a > look at Section 2 Navigating the Document, second paragraph, the last > character. Well spotted. > Also, I found it rather odd to have footnotes marked with red text "foot" on > a grey background. I rather would have expected to see numerals, or at least > a numeral along with the text. I can see the utility if the document is > intended for electronic viewing and navigation, but not if it is to be > printed. I suspect that at print time the footnote references are converted > to numerals; I did not check that at this point. This is implemented in forthcoming version 1.6.0. However, not everybody thinks that we should do that. > You try to make the case of the user applying character-based manual > formatting to a document, I suspect because that is indeed what an > *untrained* user tends to do. But, as the Lyx documentation makes > clear, *training *is a must for using Lyx. My view is that word makes is easy to do "finger-painting" and possible to do correct style-based formatting. LyX tries to do the opposite. Thanks for your comments. JMarc
