Hi Scott,
I think an annual survey is too slow and does not help if a patch is ready
and the next survey is 11 months away.
I think a few questions (like yours below) sent to the lyx-users and/or
lyx-devel mailing lists will do the job well. Those users who are
interested in answering the questions are probably also more likely to read
the mailing list.
My answers below:
(A1) continuous spell-check by default.
If the dictionary is good enough. I would probably first have to teach it
some technical jargon, but then would appreciate that feature.
(A2) behavior of LFUN_DOWN_SELECT on last line.
I think the current behavior works well.
(B1) what TeX distribution do you use (please provide the year, e.g.
TeX Live 2009) and how often do you update to the newest packages?
Many different versions on different computers. Note that not all features
have to work for all packages to maintain decent backward compatibility. As
long as the main features (basic articles/books, common templates) work
with older versions of TeX, few users will be inconvenienced. In general,
LaTeX is very stable except for Unicode-related issues, so users who write
English text (probably the largest percentage) should not encounter any
problems, if possible, with older versions of LaTeX.
A possible way to get a good response is to go back one or two major
revisions of common OSes (Mac, Linux, and that other one), and check the
latest package of common distributions. For Mac, these are "fink" and "Mac
ports"; for Linux, probably Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SuSE. Some of
these platforms have a web page that allows you to search which packages
are available in which version.
--
Regards,
Cyrille Artho - http://artho.com/
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas
must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
-- H. L. Mencken
