On 04/30/2013 10:18 PM, Cyrille Artho wrote:
You are right that poorly designed/edited layout files offer a user many ways to shoot him/herself into the foot.
I know I will not convince you, still... how many ordinary users do you think will use layout editing feature? Layout files are not that hard to write once you understand the concept, and I don't think layout editor can come much farther than presenting us with a list of keyword/value pairs. Is that much easier than following the options list in Customization.lyx? How do you think an ordinary user would react to an option "passthru" in a layout editor? I guess he will have to read the whole manual, and not only once, to understand such options. Layout editor can save one from typing, but typing is the easiest part of making a layout file.
And I am really really concerned about users whose hundred-pages theses will fall apart just by changing a name of a flex inset. (that happened to me once!)
Wouldn't it be better to work on some really cool stuff instead of layout editor, like implementing long awaited biblatex support, or improving the whole layout paradigm (as discussed in several tickets on lyx.org tracker)? Even writing an extended manual, with some examples, would be better than wasting resources on a layout editor.
Just my opinion.
