>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Breidenbach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Jeff> So, I tried 1.0.0pre8 for the first time. It autoconfigured and
Jeff> compiled beautifully. It ran beautifully and was intuitive and
Jeff> simple. It was easy for me to bang out a document, even though I
Jeff> was totally rusty on latex commands. I loved the ease of
Jeff> displaying dvi and postscript. I liked the help menu - it was
Jeff> very well integrated, easy for me to use, and having "Known
Jeff> Bugs" as a pull down menu adds a lot of credibility to the
Jeff> software. I thought the menu layout was essentially well chosen,
Jeff> and loved the search and replace tool. WYSIWYM worked great, and
Jeff> its use of color was brilliant. I experienced no crashes, and
Jeff> was pleased to discover autosave when I killed the process. The
Jeff> spell checker was a good bonus.
Ahh, I like to hear such things... :)
Jeff> I noticed some things that might be improved for later
Jeff> versions. By far the most important thing was screen fonts. My
Jeff> screen fonts didn't scale nicely to the sizes they were
Jeff> displayed, giving a very blocky look. I did some adjusting until
Jeff> I got something that looked ok but it took some fiddling. I'm
Jeff> not a font guy and don't pretend to know the nature of the
Jeff> configuration issue.
The secret is to add
\screen_font_scalable false
to your lyxrc file. It is somehow described in lyxrc.
Jeff> I do suggest, that for the majority of the
Jeff> people who try lyx, that the screen fonts shouldn't look blocky
Jeff> when lyx is first run. I'm guessing this is something to be
Jeff> addressed by the linux distributions or in RPMs or something. I
Jeff> want to emphasize that the first impression is actually a big
Jeff> deal, and chunkified fonts make a significant (non-positive)
Jeff> first impression.
Agreed. I wanted to make this the default, but people who happen to
have a good set of scalable fonts, did not want that (understandably).
Jeff> Next, lyx menus suffer a bit from the "radically different
Jeff> choices are right next to each other yet look quite similar"
Jeff> syndrome. For example, in the File menu, less popular choices
Jeff> like "revert to saved..." are identically rendered as the more
Jeff> popular choices. Picking out the common choices requires just a
Jeff> bit too much brain power. I read that nuclear power plant
Jeff> operators face similar problems problems when are deciding which
Jeff> lever to push out of a zillion near identical choices.
Jeff> I hate to use Microsoft as an example, but their most recent
Jeff> version of Office addresses this problem by putting a just few
Jeff> small icons inside the pull down menus, next to the most popular
Jeff> choices. This makes popular choices easier to pick out from the
Jeff> crowd. I strongly suspect that this depends on the GUI toolkit
Jeff> (XForms?), but I thought it was worth mentoning.
That'sa good comment. We'll have to re-think the menu hierarchy at
some point.
Jeff> As far as minor quirks, I found it a bit odd that the dialog
Jeff> boxes had different key binding than the main editing
Jeff> window. Again I assume this is xforms at work, but it was a bit
Jeff> wierd. My backspace key was bound differently, and emacs
Jeff> bindings were only enabled in the dialog boxes. I guess I'm
Jeff> happy everything appears configurable, but I'd have preferred a
Jeff> more consistant default.
Agreed, but there is not much we can do here...
Jeff> Ok, that's it, have a great 1.0.0 release. Sorry for throwing
Jeff> feedback at the list days before it goes out the door. I'm
Jeff> totally delighted; lyx makes latex accessable to me for casual
Jeff> use. I look forward to using it for years to come.
You're welcome. We *love* this kind of feedback :)
JMarc
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