>>>>> "Larry" == Larry S Marso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Disclaimer: since I am painfully doing multitasking between the
mailing list and my real work, don't take what I write this week as
something I really think :)
Larry> On Tue, Jan 26, 1999 at 11:08:26AM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes
Larry> wrote:
>> The problem is not in the functionality, but in the spirit. Most
>> people I know use Word as a glorified MacWrite. They don't
>> structure their documents because word makes it easy to just manage
>> words and make them look like what they need. This is the ``What
>> you see is all you get'' problem. By making low level formatting
>> less easy to obtain, LyX tries to make strctured documents the
>> default. And that makes a huge difference.
Larry> You've repeated this theme twice today: that LyX is good
Larry> because it "denies people functionality", and maybe would be
Larry> better if it denied people even more functionality (like
Larry> toggling bold).
I do not want to deny functionality to anybody. Let's take an example:
you want to add a section header in word. Obviously, the most
intuitive way of doing this for a first time user is to select the
text, set it to bold and add a carriage return afterwards. It is the
most intuitive because all those nice icons are there on the toolbar
(note that there is no 'section' icon, so people would have to look in
the style combox first).
Now, what I'd like to obtain (and I am not sure how to do it) is an
interface that make good things intuitive and bad things a bit less
direct (as in 'use the character popup'; not what I'd call
'denying'). The idea is that, if you use bold so often that you would
need a special shortcut/icon, then there is a problem in the way you
use LyX. 'bold' is not a concept, but a font. So what would be needed
is probably a high level concept (strong emphasize for example) which
does right what you are trying to achieve by hand.
Larry> LyX is great because it delivers far *more* functionality than
Larry> any other word processor.
Except for output quality and the math editor, I would not say that
LyX ``delivers far *more* functionality'' than MS word, for example
(and I do not like this program). However, LyX has an interface based
on structure rather than appearance, and this is its strong point.
Larry> To say that fonts are limited misses the point. It's font
Larry> packages are true typeset fonts, including ligatures -- which
Larry> Word does not offer, by the way, for those advancing the Word
Larry> parity theory. Such font collections are rare in the open
Larry> source universe. That's the major reason why LaTeX includes so
Larry> few alternative fonts.
I know that. What I just said is that LyX (and to some extent LaTeX)
is designed to use three fonts: a roman font, an sans serif font and a
typewriter font (and these fonts can be any PS/truetype/metafont
outline). You can of course use 10 different fonts in a document with
a lot of red text, but I would not say that LyX has *good* support for
that (and I would say, if I dare, that this is a good point, because
many documents using multiple fonts look ugly, unless people know what
they do).
Larry> That new TeX book put out by Oxford University Press in 1998 is
Larry> devoted at least 50% to the question of how you build and
Larry> install new font sets for LaTeX, taking advantage of true
Larry> typesetting. It identifies a handful that are open source,
Larry> freely available.
The fact that a book is necessary to explain how to use correctly
fonts in LaTeX shows how un-intuitive this is. I do not say this is a
weakness: that's just what happens when you want top typographcal
quality. But there are things for which I would use a word processor
(Word, WP, KWord, or whatever) and not LyX (for the same reason that I
would not use LyX to send mail).
Larry> By the way, does the teTeX beta distribution (0.9?) offer
Larry> additional font sets?
I do not know.
JMarc
