On Fri, Jan 22, 1999 at 12:03:51PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> Martin> 1. Which text to use as basis for further work. Mine, or
> Martin> Larry's?
>
> Yours, of course. I think the latest version is pretty good and was
> rather surprised to see Larry qualify it as 'weak'...
Certainly, yours, Martin. But I hope you get lots of additional comments
from other people, take another look at mine, and do some more thinking
about what we're trying to accomplish.
I'm from a school of thought that's definitely *not* mainstream here.
I think LyX is an amazing piece of word processing software, built on
top of a remarkably robust foundation. I've heard some longtime Mac
users talking about OS/X lately ("great interface -- perhaps the best
GUI available -- now on top of an extremely powerful and stable OS"),
and they've captured some of my feelings about what distinguishes LyX from
WordPerfect, M$ Word and their breed.
We have an opportunity to take the open source world by storm. And even
to get major media coverage -- even more than The Gimp ever has. We
could write (pre-release) articles that put LyX systematically alongside
WordPerfect and make the comparison. We could target a press release
and ship it off to all the authors of recent media pieces about open
source and WordPerfect coming to Linux (lexis-nexis: .ns;open source or
Wordperfect w/i 5 linux).
However, I don't think this works as well without a more complete set
of example documents, templates, alternative textclasses, than we have
now.
"Hollywood" is a very nice example of what we ought to have in about
five more categories.
I have two documents -- unfortunately using hacked LaTeX preambles
instead of disciplined textclasses so far -- that could be entitled
"Business Plan" and "Presentation Book".
I've asked the list a couple of times whether there was sufficient interest
in collecting together examples documents, for us to establish an ftp site
where people could post their efforts. There has never been much of a
response, which I suggests my views are atypical.
It's too bad. If I had my druthers, I'd say lock down the code base, then
let's devote two months to taking out all our BEST, most impressive LyX
documents, formats, etc. and create an outstanding set of included files
that will blow the socks off new users. Frankly, I think the current
release strategy is perhaps too rushed, perhaps too timid.
But I'm just one guy, and not a contributer to the LyX code base. Still,
I'm here to speak freely, ready to give and receive criticism, to do
whatever I can to help promote a truly outstanding open source package.
Best regards
--
Larry S. Marso
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
