On Thu, Feb 04, 1999 at 10:50:06PM -0400, Garst R. Reese wrote:
> A "corrected"? version of scriptone.lyx was sent already sent to me. I
> ran it and my version through the spell checker. Yes, there were
> spelling errors in both :). But I am guessing that Reuben saw the
> (parenthetical . problem and perhaps did not look at scriptone.lyx using
> the hollywood.cls. The parenthetic problem is that you enter text with
> paragraph type parenthical with no ()'s. LyX shows an opening but no
> closing ( on screen. ViewPostscript correctly shows both, but all of
> this only happens if you use hollywood.cls which needs to be installed
> "somewhere where latex can find it":)
First of all (this might belong in my last e-mail) I think if there's only
one example doc for a given class, and that doc is supposed to be a general
example of that class, then the doc should have the same name as the class,
just to be superclear. That said, I already suggested that I think a
shortened version of this would look better in templates/.
Another thing I forgot to write in my last e-mail is that in a template
especially but also in an example, you can use Notes to explain things to
people that aren't so intuitive about the class. It's nice for a template
because then if a person prints it out to see what it looks like, the Notes
have no effect on the printed document. So, to use this e-mail as an example
of an unintuitive layout, you could do Insert->Note and write "DO NOT print
the parentheses characaters '(' and ')' before and after the parenthetical
statement. They will be put in automatically.
That said, I think perhaps the parenthetical style would work better if you
got away from WYSIWYG. I supposed you chose the normalsize typewriter one
parenthesis so that it would look like the beginning of a parentheses. Which
is a good idea, but I think that way too many newbies won't do the right
thing. And while we LyXers admit that you can't (and shouldn't) create a
program that works without people reading *any* docs, it's always nicer to
make things intuitive. There's a few things you could do here.
(1) Write '()' instead of '('. That's a visual cue that this is a
parenthetical statement, but it won't freak people out thinking there's an
unmatched parenthesis.
(2) Use Bold and/or a different color for the (). That makes it totally
obvious that it's not regular text. See various slides layouts
or the Comment layout for an example.
(3) Write "Parenthetical:" instead of '(' or '()'. Obviously this would work
best in combination with #2 above
(4) change the color/font/whatever of the actual *text* of a parenthetical
(as opposed to the LabelString). You could, for example, make it *smaller*
to show that it's a parenthetical. But that might hurt people's eyes, and
they might think it's going to be printed smaller. (Hm. The second objection
may be silly.) A less controversial idea woudl be to change the color of a
parenthetical. Again, a visual cue that something's going on, but the
average user won't be concerned that it will print out in that color. Um,
probably.
Or you could ignore these thoughts (smiley removed). But I think one or some
of these changes could reduce bug reports and frustration.
I should probably mention, even though it's Friday, that this is a really
cool layout. It's great to see that you can use LyX for many more uses than
journal articles. Once Jean-Marc adds his cv, and we get maybe a newsletter
or something, we'll have a much nicer mix of scientific & non-scientific
stuff.
-Amir
