I hope you don't mind seeing user feedback on lyx-devel, but I don't
know to what extend posts on lyx-user are seen by developers. So, here
we go:
After finshing a thesis written with Lyx, I feel the urge to give some
feedback and offer some ideas based on my experiences with using Lyx
for a project like this. I used 1.1.4fix3 but I checked 1.1.6fix2 to
avoid making any obsolete suggestions (I hope I didn't miss anything).
MULTILINGUAL SPELLCHECKING
I'm in the humanities and I often deal with multilingual texts (e.g.
core text in German with quotes in English and French). This basically
makes spell checking under Lyx impossible (you keep hitting "ignore
word" to skip the quotes until your fingers bleed).
I noticed that 1.1.6 now supports defining the language of a single
paragraph or phrase. Unfortunately, this only adds "\selectlanguage"
(which of course is a feature) but doesn't seem to deal with the
spellchecker. Restarting ispell/aspell with the appropriate options
whenever there is a language change would be a major usability
improvement.
PRE-/POSTPROCESSOR COMMANDS
I'm running ligatex as a preprocessor for fine-tuning ligatures when
using CM or expert PS fonts. With Lyx, I presently have to export to a
Tex file as a final step, manually run ligatex, and then manually run
Latex.
I'd appreciate it if there was an option telling Lyx to run a generic
preprocessor before running Latex. That would be ligatex in this case,
but considering the dynamic nature of Tex I'm sure there are a lot of
situations in which some kind of preprocessor would come in handy.
It might also be worthwhile to consider supporting a postprocessor
that is launched after (pdf)latex/bibtex but before any dvi/pdf
viewer (one word: thumbpdf).
NATBIB/BIBTEX
Natbib, as you know, supports a variety of \cite commands. I'm not
only talking about stuff like \citep or \citealt but also things like
\citetalias. I have been missing an option allowing me to pick a
specific \cite command for _each_ citation. The idea is to set a
default command on a per-file basis while being able to override this
(with an occasional \citetalias for example) on a per-citation basis.
The list of \cite commands available would be user defineable in some
configuration file using tokens that are replaced by Lyx when writing
the citation to the Tex file. Consider the following bibcmds.map:
# %b = text before
# %a = text after
# %k = bibtex key
#
# Command Requires
#
\citet[%b][%a]{%k} natbib.sty
\citeauthor{%k} natbib.sty
\citepalias{%k} natbib.sty
This way, the feature wouldn't be restricted to a specific package
like natbib. As far as novice users not familiar with Latex are
concerned, you would just provide the commands suitable for a typical
scenario (which are hard-coded otherwise) as defaults in bibcmds.map.
FONT SELECTION
Having _a lot_ of T1/TT fonts which are available to Latex, I would
really like to pick more of them from the document pop-up instead of
using Latex commands in the preamble. What I've been missing for a
long time is a simple map file allowing me to configure which fonts
show up under the "fonts" drop down box.
Actually, it might be smarter to have three drop-downs in the document
pop-up so you can set the default serif, sans serif, and typewriter
font independently and support something like a texfonts.map file to
define the list of available fonts:
# Visible Name Latex Name Default Family
# Encoding
#
"CM Roman OsF (ecofonts)" cmor T1 serif
"CM Sans Serif (aefonts)" aess T1 sans
"CM Typewriter (zefonts)" zett T1 typewriter
"ITC Officina Sans" po9 T1 sans
"Adobe Times" ptm T1 serif
"URW Nimbus Roman No. 9" utm T1 serif
"BT Courier 10 Pitch" bcr T1 typewriter
"Adobe Garamond" pad T1 serif
"Adobe Garamond Exp" padx T1 serif
"Adobe Garamond Exp OsF" padj T1 serif
I hope you find some of these suggenstions interesting or even worth
implementing. Keep up the great work!
BTW: Will the QT2 GUI support anti-aliased fonts in the text area?
This would take my "Lyx experience" to a new level ;)
--
Philipp Lehman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
