On Mar 14, 2015, at 9:56 AM, Robert Susmilch <rob...@susmilch.com> wrote:
> This seems absurd given that Lyx purports to free you to write and not
> micromanage things like this. The tutorial goes on and on about using
> citations, bibliography, automatic section and chapter title numbering
> that takes care of itself. If I can number an equation and it's
> automatic that means the equation numbering can / will change as they
> are moved about, added or deleted, etc.
I agree, but would stop short of "absurd" and simply say "awkward," "clumsy,"
and then I'll stop. It does work. I believe that Microsoft Word and Mathematica
require the same sort of tedious labeling, and those are not necessarily good
models. I know for a fact that this problem can be handled better because I
used the long-gone and much-loved FullWrite Professional for about 10 years,
from 1988 to 1998, and it did not require labeling of anything. You simply
inserted, as a reference, the current equation number and then FullWrite
automatically kept everything up to date. It was just that simple.
And, not trivially, FullWrite had a _graphical_ equation browser, a
window of all your (filtered) stand-alone equations, numbered or not, in a
scrollable window. Now _that_ was neat. I think I have filed a feature request
for LyX but I don't expect anything to happen for a long time. However, LyX has
an option to render equations on-screen already (Instant Preview) so it seems
that the hard part of a graphical browser has already been done.
With a graphical browser, one could assign nonsense labels (AA, AB, AC,
... or just 1, 2, 3, ...) and use the graphical browser to find the one to
which you want to insert a reference and just click on the image. That's what
you do anyway, only instead of a dedicated graphical browser, you just scroll
around in your main document window until you find the equation you want to
reference, and that's not efficient or fun.
and then...
On Mar 15, 2015, at 5:26 PM, David A Case <c...@biomaps.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2015, Robert Susmilch wrote:
>>
>> I have Googled a way to refer to numbered equations in text, such as
>> "See equation (3)" in Lyx but everything I read, whether from other
>> users or wikis, suggests labeling the already numbered equations and
>> then using the label to cross reference.
>>
>> This seems absurd ....
>
> This has been discussed before on this list. The requirement to have a
> label makes good sense: how do you propose to refer to an equation that
> does not have a label? Remember that its number will change as equations
> are added or removed, whereas the label will not change.
>
> It seems like you may wish to have a cross reference that says the
> following: "refer to the *current* equation (3), and update the number in
> the cross reference if the corresponding equation number changes." This
> might be implemented by having LyX create a unique but hidden label for
> every numbered equation, and providing some sort of user interface to
> refer to it.
Nice answer.
>
> For good reasons or bad, this is not the way LyX and latex work.
Why do you say this? You just proposed a solution to use the LyX/Latex
underpinnings to do that very thing. And that's probably the way FullWrite did
it.
> Note that
> numbered equations are no different in this respect than are numbered
> sections, etc.
>
> ....dave case
>
Finally (I'll file a ticket for this in due course), a simple improvement of
the current system would be to display the labels with more characters than are
currently used; currently, so few characters are displayed that one quickly
becomes confused about which equation the label belongs to.
Jerry
