Eberhard, Charlie, and Anders,
I think my reply works better if I answer all of you with just the one
reply, otherwise there would be a lot of duplication of effort on my part.
On 9/9/13 8:34 AM, Anders Ekberg wrote:
On 2013-09-09 15:23, "Charlie" <aries...@skymesh.com.au> wrote:
On Mon, 09 Sep 2013 06:54:39 -0600 "Ken Springer snowsh...@q.com" sent
this:
>I've know RTFM for years, and have often used it.
<snip>
With the risk that I also might have missed the point. I think it was
suggested that if you RTFM. Your question will be answered and there
would be no need to post to the list.
If I understood it correctly, the point was bundling TeX and LyX. This
would probably make it easier for first-timers. But the download would be
massive, which persons who just update LyX probably would not like.
Downloading "if needed" would require a script that someone would need to
create and (not the least) maintain.
As for documentation I personally think the wiki, Tutorial and User's
guide are excellent. But I am probably blind for difficulties a beginner
faces. Unfortunately I think those that have the difficulties fresh in
mind, and are the ones that I think should update
http://wiki.lyx.org/Mac/Mac (or create a "Beginner's video guide" or
whatever they find would be helpful and is currently missing for a
beginner) are often hesitant to do this since they think they are not
experienced enough. So we have a bit of a catch 22Š
A lot of my original message, Message-ID: <l0f8nq$iib$1...@ger.gmane.org>,
was intended to refer to the true newbie/beginner. I'm just too damned
old to be a newbie! LOL
And a lot was meant to refer to the website itself, not the program or
documentation.
Anders is correct, I was talking about the bundling of LyX and some kind
of TeX program. Anders brings up a point about folks who only need the
update to LyX as opposed to someone needing the whole package. If you
use Windows, that's an option already. There are two packages
available, one for the person needing everything, like me, and one who
only needs to update LyX. If it can be done for Windows, why can't it
be done for the Mac? I don't know about any Linux versions, but I'd
still have the same question.
I've not had the chance to check the documentation for LyX, but my
experiences with documentation, especially on the web, is it's
incomplete and disjointed. There's no organization. No index. And my
questions are never answered. Neither do I get answers from forums,
from almost anyone. Commercial or open source. I've been trying to get
a networking question between OS X and Windows answered for 3 months. I
finally have some thing that's workable, but it's a kludge and ignores
any and all sharing restrictions.
As for the website, or documentation for that matter, my mind always
defaults to the lowest common denominator. How would a person who
doesn't know how to spell LyX respond to what is on the site? With the
people in my past, I'd say they would look at the site, and walk away
from LyX. I doubt that is what the developers would like.
If the truly new person, who found LyX using search engine, walks away
from LyX because nothing makes any sense to them, LyX has possibly lost
a convert.
One problem I've found with documentation is, it's almost always
incomplete and out of date. (Remember, this is a general impression,
I've not had the time to read the LyX documentation.) Even the LyX site
appears to be out of date regarding installation under Mountain Lion.
The site mentions ML's Gatekeeper, and how to get around it. But the
Gatekeeper wasn't a problem for me. Somebody apparently fixed the
issue, but the site is out of date on that.
I don't know if this has made anything more understandable or not, but
I'm out of time for today. :-(
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.4
Firefox 23.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.04
