>>>>> "Allin" == Allin Cottrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Allin> Not having tried LyX in at least three years, I just downloaded
Allin> and compiled version 1.0.2. Personally, I'm firmly committed
Allin> to regular LaTeX, but I was looking for something that might
Allin> tempt my wife and 13-year-old daughter away from MS word, and
Allin> hence minimize the rebooting requirements for the family PC!
Allin> Basically, I'm impressed with the progress LyX has made, but I
Allin> do have a few critical comments.
Allin> 1. LyX crashed on my attempting to resize the main window
Allin> (after initially shrinking it for my primitive 640x480 screen).
That's strange. Could you give more details? I presume it was an X error.
Allin> I suppose this is an xforms bug. Which prompts me to ask: How
Allin> invested in xforms is the LyX team? To my eye the widget set
Allin> looks rather clunky compared to "modern" GUI tools like gtk.
Allin> Also the behavior is a bit odd. E.g. the pull-down menus have
Allin> a strange modality: they won't "go away" unless one clicks well
Allin> clear of them. You can't do a quick exploration of the menu
Allin> options by "panning" across the menus and displaying each in
Allin> turn, as you can in many GUIs.
If you go a bit at www.devel.lyx.org, you will find out that one of
the goals of version 1.1.x of LyX is GUI indepence. This means that we
hope to offer several front-ends (gtk/gnome, qt/kde, fltk, xforms,
curses, or whatever people feel like coding) to a common backend. This
is of course a lot of work, and a lot remains to do.
Allin> 2. On my display, at any rate, the default screen fonts look
Allin> perfectly awful.
Yes, it is certainly difficult to have something which offers clear
fonts with any font server (only linux and a few others support
truetype fonts). On my large screen, I get good results with bitmap
fonts, associated to the '\screen_font_scalable false' statement in
lyxrc.
Allin> I could get quite a decent appearance by
Allin> substituting TrueType fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Courier
Allin> New) for the defaults, since I run xfstt. But then of course I
Allin> lost these on my second run. If LyX is intended to appeal to
Allin> people who find native LaTeX a bit too "technical", there
Allin> really should be a way of saving preferences to one's lyxrc
Allin> without having to edit the file manually. In fact, everything
Allin> that is currently configurable via lyxrc ought to be
Allin> configurable via dialogs/menus in the running program. And
Allin> most of this stuff ought to be saved by default (e.g. if one
Allin> chooses new screen fonts in a given session, it's a safe bet
Allin> that one wants to see them again next time).
We all agree that the options menu should be re-written and lyxrc
modifiable through GUI. But somebody has to do it...
Allin> 3. A significant bug: "Update dvi" failed to work on my system.
This bug is particular to 1.0.2. The newly released 1.0.3 fixes that.
Allin> 4. Font selection menus: I can well understand that you want
Allin> to steer the user away from hard-coded font changes, in favor
Allin> of writing a real structured document. Generally, there's
Allin> little call for putting text into boldface manually; that
Allin> should be taken of by sectioning or titling commands. On the
Allin> other hand, italics (e.g. for emphasis) generally have to be
Allin> hand-coded. So I think most users would appreciate one-stop
Allin> shopping for emphasis mode on the (default) toolbar.
Like the `!' icon, for example?
Allin> I have to
Allin> say that I found it unintuitive to have font changes under a
Allin> "Layout" menu, and also that even having located the
Allin> font-changing dialog I found it quite inscrutable (and I've
Allin> hand-coded virtual fonts!). I still have little idea what the
Allin> options in that dialog amount to.
I am surprised that those options are unintuitive to you if you are
familiar with LaTeX...
Hope this helps.
JMarc
