On 2011-03-23, John McCabe-Dansted wrote: > On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:51 PM, Rob Oakes <lyx-de...@oak-tree.us> wrote:
>> While I have some ideas about why it may have happened, I think that >> Pavel hit the nail on the head. When I talk to people about LyX, they >> seem to think of it as a specialized academic writing tool. Basically, >> a program which helps professors and students write a thesis or >> articles. (To be even more narrow, it seems like many think it is for >> math and physics people to write a thesis or article.) IMV, handling formal, complex documents and math typesetting are actually LyX main strenghts. ... > To the extent that the stereotype is true, it may also be worth > considering what the reasons are for this, and if it is reasonable to > remove those reasons. Off-the-top of my head the following could be > issues. > 1) Compile Errors. ... > 1b) Perhaps we could improve the latex export so that compile errors > only occur if the user uses ERT. This is an ongoing task (as LaTeX evolves and there are far too many ways to create a compile error that cannot be foreseen). However, my experience is that LaTeX compile errors are already treated as bugs, so no change in policy is needed. Also there is usually fast help (hints on "thw right way" or workarounds) when compile errors are reported on the users list (even faster if a minimal example is given). > 2) Compatibility with Word. Typical users expect to be able to open > and save word documents. ... > 3) Not WYSIWYG. ... > After the content is complete, I go though a cycle of: Notice > something weird with the line-breaking in the PDF, muck around with > the LyX source hoping it fixed the problem; recompile PDF. This can > take a while and having a WYSIWYG mode could make this process a > factor of ten times faster. Where do you expecte the speedup? * Compiling a long, complex document can take considerable time. In WYSIWYG mode, this time would be needed with every edit action. * A major speedup of the process is possible without WYSIWYG mode: The keyword is "inverse search": clicking in the PDF viewer brings you to the right spot in the source. Getting this to work out of the box seems a worthwile task. Günter
