Hi folks, yesterday I gave a presentation about LyX at the local Linux
User Group. There were over 40 people attending and the whole thing
went pretty smooth, I saw only one guy falling asleep and the
questions from the audience encouraged me, that people actually
understood what the whole thing was about.
Now here is what I did in order to prepare:
First, all the helpful and interesting discussions about the PR
document lead me to the idea to take Martins 2nd draft and turn it
into a short presentation using ... KPresenter - No no just kidding -
of course I used Lyx and FoilTeX. I made seven slides, the files are
attached b.t.w., emphasizing on the various subjects that have been
discussed between Larry, Amir, Martin and the rest of us so
intensively.
The emphasis that I put on things becomes visible from the attached
file. I learned one thing yesterday: The audience consisted of about
less then 10 percent Latex users, many of whom said, they had tried
Latex only occasionally And they said for occasional use it'd be way
to complicated so they gave up.
I also had to put a lot of emphasis on explaining why it is not
possible to type two spaces and get to see two spaces, with other
words explaining the WYSIWYM principle. It is the better way of
writing, we know it but it was and still is my opinion that we have
to offensive about it. Unfortunately users that have never used Latex
do not have the same appreciation for all the features LyX provides,
they will flat out compare it with the ccommercially available word
processing software unless you work out the differences.
People I say, let us make a __nice__ letter class, something that
really shows some features, a costumized letter head with a postscript
figure maybe, list bank connections on the bottom, attachments and so
on, I think Rick had already started in that direction. And then lets
ask one of the code wizzards to implement just a little more Wysiwym
for writing a letter... If it is possible to draw a table, then could
one start there and take some of that code to actually draw a letter
head ?
Same for a slide or foil, could there be a horizontal line where a
Foilhead starts ? Or even the Foilhead with \lhead and \rhead ? Man
that'd be cool. Or could there be a horizontal line where a newpage
is now marked as ERT ? Look at how my slides look in LyX and in gv
and you now what I am talking about.
Anyway, part two of the presentation was then based on the lgt-0.3.
This prooved to be very helpful though it is very easy to get lost in
the lgt and switching between the enlarged screenshots and the actual
document is quite cumbersome. Also at the most interesting points
there is always the temptation to click on something which of course
has no effect.
That brough me to an idea, is there someone here who knows a little
basic Java in order to call the LyX-server from within Netscape ? Is
that at all possible ? I have no idea. Then one could have the LGT
open, click on something and it would actually happen in LyX. That
would be somehow more useful. One would not have to type all the text
and could maybe do a little more math magic...
The third part was titled Live fun with LyX and was to give the
audience opportunity for questions and give me time to show off some
of LyX's features live. All with the pre8 version I downloaded
yesterday afternnon :-)
That went pretty good. Questions were,
- postscript support, i.e. pictures and fonts can one replace the
document fonts (that are printed) and can one get nicer screen fonts.
I was able to answer both questions in principle. - math editor, well
actually no one asked so I did that one anyway - Latex import vs. the
native LyX format vs. LinuxDoc. Comes to my mind ? How do the KDE
people write their documentation ? Is Koffice ready and up for that
? - Word import, yep honestly, this was the third question I got. -
spellchecker, everybody liked the spellchecker interface - printing -
fax support (Can I really fax a 25 page document ?) - where to get it
All in all I got very positive reactions and hope that I've caused a
few people to actually give it a try.
Thanks to all of you who more or less directly gave me ideas for this
presentation.
I have attached the LyX file of my talk, it maybe possible to include
it into the LyX template collection but then, it has some significant
ERT ;-)
Roland
On 22-Jan-99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks to one of today's messages mentioning that Steven has put the LGT
> on his Web site (thanks, Steven!). Now that I've actually had the chance
> to try it out in real life, the constant reloading of images really
> bothers me; i.e. I start the page (boy, do we need to get a background in
> there!) and it takes a while to load (I expected this). If I click on a
> thumbnail, I get the big image as expected, but then if I click on the
> "back" button, it reloads all the thumbnails again. Is this behavior
> observed by anyone else, or do I just have something screwed up in my
> Netscape setup?
>
> If everyone sees it, any recommended solution? One idea is to break it up
> into 5 or so pages, that way only 15 thumbs will be loaded at a time vs.
> 75. Another possibility is to have each image pop up a new browser window,
> leaving the main window intact. Yuck. I guess I might be able to do
> something with frames, but people who use frames would also steal sheep.
> So, any suggestions?
>
> Mike
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Roland Krause
Visiting Research Associate - Center for Computational Mechanics
Washington University, Saint Louis
Roland Krause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
LyX-present.tar.gz
