>>
>
> Maybe, it depends if you can give me a real cause ;). Just telling I don't
> like it and not saying what you don't like or how you would like things done
> is not very helpfull.
>
You are right :), I am sorry.
The trouble began, when she noticed that latex will produce endless lines over
the page borders if no cell width is defined. Thus she defined the width for
each cell. Cross checking with the postscript preview she noticed that with
here width definitions the lines of some cells where brocken quite badly. Not
that latex did anthing wrong, no. Finetuning the table was just necessary.
Nothing bad about that, however the document was about 40 pages with a lot of
bitmaps included as postscript :). Considering the fact that it was midnight
and the report had to be done by the morning, the finetuning simply drove her
nuts.
It would have helped her to have a better preview within lyx. Also it would be
great to adjust the cell width by moving the lines between the cells. I donīt
think it is necessary to see how the lines are broken exactly, as in most cases
one just want to know if the cell is big enought for everything fitting in a
single line. And I doubt a real wysiwyg is possible with latex in this case :)
What about a table with mouse moveable lines as mentioned above plus a cell
measurement around the table with an extra color? While moving the lines I
can interactively see how the width is changing. Also it would be nice if lyx
is limiting my table to a maximum of the printable area, taking the papersize
and border sizes into account.
I hope this gives you a better idea of what I wanted to say?
By the way: There was another thing driving my girl friend nuts this evening ;).
She used a lot of enumerations nested in itemizations. Together with her
extense use of pictures latex did a real poor job in formating the text by
leaving single items as orphans and widows. Surely, it is quite hard for tex to
"smell" what text is in a logical context and should be kept together on a
page. Thus we tried to help tex by defining minipages for the enumerations to
keep together. This works - but I donīt know if this is the correct way to do
it. However doing it in lyx was quite a pain as you have to click thru the
paragraph options. Wouldnīt it be better to select a certain amount of text and
to have a toggle button or shortcut to combine it on a minipage by a single
click? Plus having a crosscheck if it makes sense with the currently selected
amount of text to do so, for all the cases the selected text would span two
pages and more.
Going thru all this trouble I thought it is quite hard for convincing her at
all. However Microsoft was so kind to update her as "User2000" (yuck). After
installing loads of software she tried the new Office the "lyx way" and guess
what: I heard a lot of grumbling about this damn Winword. Thus I guess the case
isnīt yet decided and lyx still has a good chance :)
oliver
---
Oliver Eichler, Dipl.-Ing.
DSP Solutions
Ingenieure Kellermann, Voigt, Hoepfl, Eichler und Weidner
Partnerschaft
