On Monday 22 March 2010 08:51:55 Walter van Holst wrote: > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Re: things that I miss in lyx > Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:51:24 +0100 > From: Walter van Holst <walter.van.ho...@xs4all.nl> > To: Jose Quesada <ques...@gmail.com> > > On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:34 +0100, Jose Quesada <ques...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > In no special order, things that I miss in lyx... > > > > 1. incremental search > > > > 2. sentence autocapitalization > > As others have written, NO! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY, DON'T!
++ > > > 3. grammar check (not crucial) [clip] > > 4. search highlight occurences [clip] > > 7. the rest of the world operates on rich text/html. LyX doesn't > > (clipboard > > > integration is poor, copy-pasting from/to web loses formatting) > > Actuall, I prefer the current default of losing formatting. The whole > point of LyX is that you focus on structure and content and have LaTeX > take > care of formatting. The rest of the world operates on a fundamentally > braindead paradigm and if I wanted to use that paradigm I'd be a happy OOo > camper. Which I am not. +=65535 What could be grosser than having the source's fingerpainting auto-inserted in your styles-based LyX doc? I'd like to take a second to back up a couple levels of abstraction, from features to priorities. My priorities in LyX are: * Ability to write long documents fast and easily * Styles based authoring Believe it or not, aesthetic typesetting isn't one of my priorities. My books written in WordPerfect 5.1 and MS Word were easily good enough when it came to typesetting. After all, my books are a mail order product. If I wanted to write short docs I'd use Abiword or OpenOffice, kompozer or Vim. If I didn't care about styles based authoring I'd use OpenOffice. I think priorities determine the need for features. Given my priorities, character styles was far and away the best feature addition in the last 10 years. Another great feature is LyX's ability to almost instantly manipulate 100,000 word documents -- good algorithms implemented right. Outline view was a good addition and will be even better when it can be used to add nodes. Outline view is a big timesaver. I imagine Layout Modules would be a big timesaver but haven't learned to use them yet. One of the biggest consumers of time when I use LyX is adding and tweaking styles, both paragraph (environments) and character. Getting a LyX style to do what you want is about 2 orders of magnitude more time consuming than the same thing in WP 5.1 or MS Word. That would probably go up to an order of magnitude of 3 for a LyX newbie. This can't be helped -- LaTeX is more complex and less obvious than WP5.1 or MSWord layout, but it can be addressed through a combination of: 1) Documentation 2) Easy to browse and search repository of styles to which we all contribute Sentence autocapitalization might be somewhat of a time saver if the subject matter always has a capital following a period and whitespace. But for code- rich docs, it would slow you down immensely. As far as special kinds of searches, LyX's algorithm design and implementation is so good that you can brute force search almost instantly, so what's the need? This paragraph is my opinion -- your mileage may vary. In my opinion LyX is a tool to be used in a very narrow set of circumstances -- long document writing where consistency is a priority (hence styles), and good typesetting is a priority, and table of contents and indices just work. I'd never use it for a poster -- Inkscape does posters better. I'd never use it to create a web page -- Kompozer is much better at that (exception: When a whole web subsite must have consistency and is the equivalent of a document). I wouldn't use it for a five page document -- OpenOffice and AbiWord are much easier for that, whether you're doing fingerpainting or limited styles-based. To me, adding features like autocap and especially rich/XML paste would be trying to make LyX into a tool it's not -- like putting a file on the side of a hammer. I think the decision of what features to add is all about what one does with LyX, and one's priorities in using LyX. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
