Hi,
I love LyX "spirit", its way of writing documents.
But...
I think LyX will not spread among users as long as
one cannot:
- define a new personal template (is that what a
group of styles is called?) starting from nothing,
using a GUI,
- extend an existing template by:
* modifying existing styles,
* adding new styles,
all this with GUI, and save the modified template
under a new template name.
- modify an existing template and overwrite the old
one (e.g. if the old one is not adapted to one's
country habits),
- and last but not least:
* import RTF (with the cost of some unavoidable
changes, as styles have to be strictly followed, as I
understand it) and ascii of course,
* export to RTF and HTML/XML/XHTML (the last one
probably is a good compromise: strict, XML-compliant
and viewable on old browsers), and ascii of course.
Note that import and export could be achived using
external tools seemlessly from the GUI.
Please understand that I am not against LyX; I just
think the average user badly needs all that if they
want to use LyX, because:
- the existing templates don't define all kinds of
works that a user would want to write, hence the need
to define new ones;
- the user doesn't want to loose time re-inventing
the wheel, hence the need to define a template with
the aid of an existing one;
- the user doesn't always know in advance what styles
will be needed, hence the need to modify an
existing/used template and keep the same template
name;
- most users "come from" windows or macOS or another
OS (e.g. before Linux, I had an Atari with "Le
Rédacteur" -which had nice powerful style features-),
and who knows where one will go to next
(AquawindoX?); because of that, some users care a LOT
about the past and future of their data, hence the
need to import and export from/to the most standard
formats.
You may wonder why I don't use some bloat-processor
(StarOffice5.2...) and who I am to write all this
things.
Well, *I* don't mind, as I am a capable user and a
programmer (but never found the time to understand
how to configure LyX).
But my wife *does* mind. She is a very basic user,
and intends to remain so. Let's take a REAL-WORLD
example:
My wife intends (and has the skill) to become a book
writer. She has writen small poems and novels on
Dos-Word since under the age of 10 (not all usable
-because of age- but still a nice provision of ideas
to be kept).
Meanwhile, she wrote University-related reports and
studies on the Atari (all can be saved at worst in
ascii).
Now, we use Linux (the Atari died), so I handed her
Star Office (fisrt 5.1 then 5.2). And she can't help
but endlessly complain. Here are her complaints (I
think she's right about it all):
- SO is long to load (so long she used to loose good
ideas before she had access to the word processor
-now she writes on paper first...),
- SO is slow,
- SO is complicated (how to do... very simple things
in fact),
- SO comes in the way, just like MS-Word does: to
much unwanted automation,
- SO is buggy, sometimes unpredictable.
So I looked in the desktop menus and discovered
Lyx/Klyx. At first I though: THAT'S WHAT SHE NEEDS!
Then I stumbled into the problems I state in this
mail:
- no "story-book" template:
* no it's not a science book I want,
* no it's not a report I want,
* in French, a dialog switches from speaker to
speaker by line-break and hyphen (-) and I don't want
to type all hyphens, nor do I want a bullet instead.
What I would basically need is more or less a
template with the following styles (sorry for the
French words, I don't know them all in English):
(page margins of 3cm)
- "Paragraphe": an "alinéa" of 1.5cm, R&L-margins:
0cm, space before 0.2cm, 11pts, Times.
- "Dialogue": same as "Paragraphe", with automatic
preceding "-\t", tabulation (\t) at 0.7cm,
R&L-margins: 0cm (at worst, L-margin of 0.7cm).
- "Chapitre": page-break before, centered,
emphasized, 14pts, Arioso.
And that would define the "story-book" template. Then
at some time in the future, after she already has
writen 20 pages, she may realize she needs one more
style:
- "Pensée" (that is mind-monolog/though): same as
"Paragraphe" but with italic.
Did I make my point? I really would love to propose
LyX to my wife, instead of that damned StarOffice,
but I just can't.
If someone answers to this mail, I would appreciate a
lot to be in Cc: at my e-mail adress:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bye, sorry for such a long mail, and thank you for
your attention.
Yves Gablin.
Non aux Brevets Logiciels - No to Software Patents
SIGNEZ http://petition.eurolinux.org/ SIGN
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