Jules Bean wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Nov 1999, Seak, Teng-Fong wrote:
>
> > I don't understand quite your question. Maybe we've got some
> > misunderstanding :-) Actually, I knew how to enter {}. When I ask Lyx
> > to support R_{i}{}^{j}{}_{kl}, I wanted in fact LyX not to display the red
> {}
> > to make the tensor look a bit better.
>
> There are two quite orthogonal issues here:
>
> [snipped]
> 1) Availability of font characters: LyX uses a set of X-windows fonts.
> These have in them some approximation to many of the commonly wanted
> characters in mathematical notation, but by no means all of them. LyX will
> not be able to support the others without new fonts - and possibly a more
> extendable font system.
No, no, there's nothing to do with font. Have you tried that expression
that I'd written, by the way? Well, except if you're talking about invisible
font for displaying {} in the mathbox :-)
> 2) Previewing complex things may not be worth it. TeX is an extremely
> complex system, dealing well with a variety of very complex on-page
> display issues. It may not be appropriate for LyX to attempt to solve
> some of these complex problems independently -- it's only intended to be a
> WYSIWYG previewer.
The expression R_{i}{}^{j}{}_{kl} is nothing fancy. It's at the base of
LaTeX. No auxiliary macro is needed, neither is it an extension to the
standard. It's just because this is seldom used so people might have
forgotten it.
> Tangentially to that, there's the more general question of exactly which
> job LyX is trying to solve. At the moment (at least for complex
> mathmematically documents) LyX is best thought of as a helpful tool for
> writing LaTeX, but the author needs to know, or at least be willing to
> learn as he goes along, LaTeX in order to acheive more complex effects.
> LyX is essentially a LaTeX front-end.
I agree with you. I totally understand that LyX is WYSIWYM not WYSIWYG.
I don't mind sub/superscript aren't displayed with a smaller font on the
screen, eg. But at the moment when there's something red on the screen, I'd
like to know what it is, and I'd also wonder if what I see is what I really
mean ;-)
Back to the suggestion: I think if no red {} is displayed, it might also
be difficult to understand what the underlying latex expression is. Maybe a
red (or any other colour) vertical bar could be drawn instead of {} to show
that sub/superscripts aren't rearranged to group together.
Seak
