> FYI, the limit was introduced to keep LyX from wasting huge amounts
of time calculating the TOC entries. This had been a real problem,
previously, with branches.
Oh, I see. Thanks for the information. I doubt that most people will use
really long index entries, but often entries start out the same but end
differently, as in the "Washington, George" examples I sent earlier.
That's why it's important to make it *possible* to have long index
entries show up in the Outliner, even if people don't always use that
capability.
For a lot of other things, it doesn't matter so much, because the items
listed (chapter titles, for example) will all be different from each
other. But in indexing, that's *often* not true. In a U.S. history, say,
there could be several dozen entries for "Washington, George," all with
subentries and subsubentries, and those all need to be visible in the
Outliner.
> What other entries should have more than 40 characters (the default
limit)?
Wow, great question. Maybe the default should be 80. :)
But to answer your question: You might consider any items that would be
likely to *start out* with the same text but then *change* from item to
item. I've just looked through the Outliner items for the User's Guide
and spotted a few candidates:
* List of Branches
The User's Guide gives the example of a school quiz, where the answers
will be printed only in the teacher's version. If lots of the quiz
questions started out the same way, that could be a problem. Example:
"Who was the first person to . . . [walk on the moon; wear bifocals;
send an email message, etc.]"
* List of Figures
Since this list includes such labels as "Figure 3.1:" and "Sub-Figure
b:" there's not a lot of room for the figure caption itself. It might be
nice to make this one a bit longer. Maybe abbreviate to "Fig." and
"Sub-Fig."?
* List of Footnotes
The Outliner begins each footnote with "foot," as in "foot 1: This is an
example footnote w..."
But is the "foot" really necessary? More helpful would be to provide the
chapter number or something: "3:1." Better yet, make this hierarchical,
like the TOC:
1 First Chapter Title
1 My footnote says blah blah blah.
2 Next Chapter Title
1 This footnote says blah blah blah.
2 Another footnote says blah blah blah.
It would also be nice to have more characters displayed in footnotes
just so you can get a better handle on which footnote you're dealing
with. Some of the books I work on have literally thousands of the
things. If the footnotes contain commentary, sometimes you don't get
into the real meat of the note until after a sentence or two. And if the
footnotes contain citations, *lots* of those could start out the same
but end differently. For example:
Jack Lyon, Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, p. 33.
Jack Lyon, Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, p. 4.
Jack Lyon, Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, p. 107.
Getting back to hierarchies, you might also consider making the List of
Figures hierarchical, so that subfigure captions are under figure captions.
Oh, one more thing: In my opinion, the "List of" label is superfluous.
Rather than this:
List of Figures
List of Footnotes
List of Graphics
how about this:
Figures
Footnotes
Graphics
More straightforward, less clutter. Also, more consistent with "Table of
Contents" and "Labels and References."
Hmm. How about Including the hierarchical chapter number and title in
*every* available Outline? For example:
FIGURES
1. My First Chapter Title
Fig. 1: The house that Jack built.
Sub-Fig. a: The mouse that lived under the house.
That's a little odd, but it sure would make navigation easier. I now
realize I did the same thing in my hierarchical footnote example, above.
Well, you asked. :)
I hope this helps.
Thanks again for considering my suggestions. I love LyX, and at some
point I'm going to start promoting it heavily in my newsletter, develop
new modules for it, etc.
Best wishes,
Jack
On 9/15/2011 4:01 PM, LyX Ticket Tracker wrote:
#7774: Index entries are truncated in the Outline panel (List of Indexes). But
they shouldn't be.
------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
Reporter: EditorJack | Owner: nobody@…
Type: defect | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: 2.0.2
Component: outliner | Version: 2.0.1
Severity: major | Keywords:
------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
Comment(by rgheck):
FYI, the limit was introduced to keep LyX from wasting huge amounts of
time calculating the TOC entries. This had been a real problem,
previously, with branches.
What other entries should have more than 40 characters (the default
limit)?
