Darren Freeman wrote:
On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 23:48 +0200, Helge Hafting wrote:
It is of course nice if the transition from word to LyX can be made
easier. But only as long as it don't get in the way of LyX useability.
I think if anything counter-intuitive is changed to intuitive, there
will be a learning curve on the old-timers.. but they are clever,
they'll get used to it :)
Ah, trying to win with compliments? ;-)
Of course, chaning something for the better (or slightly better)
isn't that much of a problem. The proposed "bold" change
isn't a problem with me - you still have to find someone to do the work
though.
Did anybody howl when XForms was dropped?
Yes they did, for xforms has much better display performance than qt.
Even you seems to complain about slowness - I hope this can be optimized.
Qt has support for unicode and antialiasing
(and toolbars, and better menus. . .)
so xforms simply wasn't viable any more.
Would you do it again? ;) They'll benefit from a larger pool of users
and their colleagues using LyX instead of whatever else they insist on.
I face two major challenges. Firstly, LyX is comparatively buggy. Most
of us don't see the bugs any more but try teaching a new user and they
will see them straight away.
This is indeed a problem. Anybody who develop LyX is a power user
that instinctively knows how to work around every quirk. And developers
are volunteers, fixing "little" bugs isnt the most popular work.
Note that word has its share of problems too. Try teaching a new
user to use word someday! Do you ever loose data, do you ever
have word changing the formatting in unexpected ways, might the document
print differently at another site? Just some of the things that
tends to come up when word is compared to LyX . . .
Sure but the people I'm trying to convert are used to all of that and
can't see it for the same reasons LyX power users don't notice LyX
problems :)
Sure - but it is indeed possible to remind people. Write 30 pages
and just print it - often there is no formatting work at all. And
you know it'll print the same way on every other computer/printer in
the world.
Note that there will be some improvements with the soon to be released
LyX 1.5. You will be able to insert a "mu" directly from a math toolbar,
instead of digging deep into menus and dialogs the way you have to
today.
... and it will bring payoffs with the next person I try to convert :) I
tried to get one of my supervisors interested today, and I think he will
happily ignore my request :(
Ouch. It is usually reasonable that the one doing the writing
get to choose the tool. :(
I think it is very important for any features exposed at the UI level to
work in the most intuitive way possible. Remember when you were young
and taught yourself to use a computer.. you pushed everything to see
what it did. Most people are afraid of doing that after a number of
It is sad when people are afraid of a word processor. Sure, I wouldn't
want to experiment with an important document. But I experiment
a lot - "File->New document" is easy enough, one can then do all sorts
of text-wrecking tests. Or make a copy of the entire document
to experiment on.
I don't think that's the right way to learn how to use the bold feature
for example. It should just work in the obvious way.
No need. The bold feature is so simple - an "experiment" won't
ruin much anyway - using "undo" or even manual undoing
is easy enough.
The cancel button
should undo the changes, even if they were applied, just as all other
cancel buttons in the world are known to do.
I agree. A cancel button in that dialog don't make sense, as
the dialog stays open while you edit. You can use the same
dialog instance hundreds of times, doing lots of editing.
A "cancel" undoing all that would be disastrous. Renaming it to
"close" (which is what it does) seems correct.
I agree - that button is misnamed. Fortunately, the menu edit->undo
will still work and avoid the data loss. You'll be hard pressed
to actually get data loss in LyX. I see lots of complaints of the type
"I can't figure out how to do X" but never "LyX ate my 60-page
document". The latter is a problem reserved for the competition ;-)
:) However I frequently get the "LyX won't generate output for my
60-page document and my supervisor wants to know what my progress has
been.. and why I'm using LyX against his recommendation."
Using lots of ERT then? That is usually where the problems are.
Be careful with that stuff.
As for recommendations, the only way is to impress with
Lyx's strong sides. I have been to meetings, written down
all that happened with LyX, then mailed off a nicely formatted pdf
a few minutes later. Use math and cross references.
One gets used to stability - I sometimes leave unsaved documents open
in LyX over lunch, or even overnight. What could possibly go wrong . . .
Sorry but the competition have made some improvements over the last 5
years :) Nobody expects that to go wrong any more. Not like PowerPoint
97!!!
As you see - I've been using LyX exclusively for some time. Actually,
when I started there was no choice. Openoffice didn't exist yet,
and all the other linux word processors were too bad. Most of them
still are. Consider switching to linux - you then have the
perfect excuse for not using word. ;-) ;-)
Helge Hafting
