Hello,
My name is Marcelo and I am a relatively new lyx user.
I have seen in the documentations that you ask for feedback so i will
give it.
As you probably know the learn curve for a latex user is much more
difficult than the learn curve for a typical WYSIWYG word processor.
With lyx this is much better. But maybe not enough, at least if you
purpose is to reach a broader user base.
What i mean is that people in general are busy with their activities.
They would start learning a new program only if they need it, only on
rare occasions they would learn it just for fun. If they have to write a
document then they might consider using Lyx/Latex, maybe they would even
read the documentation for a while. But they wont be able to really
start using it till they have learned enough and they invested enough
time. That is because features that might be considered advanced amongst
the developers and are considered to be reserved for power users are in
fact needed for almost any user. Every user trying to write a document
would like to draw some boxes and arrows, or change a little bit some
colors. They can do it quite simply in other programs including some
open sourced like open office. I know that learning Lyx pays back
because the user will be more efficient in future works and because of
the better formatting. However, for the first document the user would
have to work; he would have to download latex extensions, learn all the
commands for the symbols he needs and understand the WYSIWYM model. Most
of the people are not willing to do this, because they want they
document as quickly as possible.
I am not sure what could be a proper solution for this problem, i guess
that the only thing to do is continue improving the graphic interface to
make it even easier for the user.
In addition to the learn curve considerations, i also write here a
recommendation for a new feature. Lyx has the ability to insert plain
tex document in the middle of the document, this is good, because there
might be some command that Lyx does not understand and cannot represent.
However, the user using this feature losses the WYGIWYM functionality
for the whole code, even for commands that Lyx DOES understand. An
example is that I want to write a document which has some logic proofs
and i want to present them as derivation trees. There are some latex
packages that enable me to do this, so i can insert them as tex code in
my lyx document. There are commands that let me position nodes and
connect them, the labels of the nodes are simple tex text, which means
that i can use commands like \beta \to, it would be nice that lyx would
parse the commands that it understand and show the proper symbols.
Another good feature would be that lyx had a thumbnail display mode for
Tex code; that is in addition to the modes inline, collapsed and open.
In that mode lyx would cache a preview of that piece of code parsed by
latex and show it inside a square, to give some feel about how the page
looks like. It would not have interactive edition capabilities but it
would help to understand the document better when a document has many of
code pieces.
I don't expect this things to be implemented tomorrow, but it would be
great if you consider this recommendations for the long run.
Good luck, people.
Marcelo
