Hello,
I am not subscribed to lyx-devel, but I was advised to sent my small
wish list here. Sorry, if these are already been mentioned, worked on,
or already solved, but it is really difficult for an ordinary user to
follow devel efforts..
Current version I use is 1.1.6fix3 on solaris8.
I started using lyx for preparing presentations. The following features
would make my life much easier.
* A display scale option in The Insert -> Figure requester. This
option could be used to scale the screen rendering of the eps
figure by a certain percentage. Especially when scaling
figures within minipages, large width/height % values are
given so that the figure fills the minipage as much as
possible. Currently such values create very large screen
renderings of the figure.
Alternatively, the minipage scaling could be taken into
account while determining the size of the on-screen rendering
of the figure.
* It is extremely hard to edit/change properties of minipages.
AFAIK the only way to modify the properties is to mark
paragraphs and select Layout -> Paragraph. Paragpraph
properties are not updated when the cursor is moved to
another paragraph like for example in the table requester.
Especially for minipages that are placed side by side (done
quite frequently for viewslides), all minipage dimensions
need to be modified. This requires frequent trips to
Paragraph-> Layout menu. Furthermore it is hard to see whether
or not all intended paragraphs have been modified. In
itemized environments each item can have a separate minipage
and it is fairly easy to leave out one during selection
process. Separate minipages (minipages with different
properties) can not be visually differentiated.
It would be extremely nice if a minipage had a structure like
the float/footnote system. This would also leave a 'clickable'
object on the screen which could be used to pop-up the
properties of the minipage. The onscreen size of the frame
could be used to give an indication of the relative size of
the minipage to the textwidth.
If the user starts a minipage (by perhaps insert->minipage)
until s/he moves out of the frame with the cursor, s/he would
be within the same minipage. This would also allow easier
formatting of the minipage like a normal document. Currently,
if a new paragraph/item is inserted a non-minipage paragraph
is formed. Then you have to first look at the preceeding
paragraph, memorize its options, move to the new paragraph
and enter exactly the same options. If you implement a method
like I described, as long as you are within the 'box' all new
entries would have the same properties automatically. If the
user wishes to use the current system s/he could use a new
insert->minipage for each new paragraph/item.
Another idea would be to have left side tabs, similar to
nested environments.
That's it. Please, please please better minipage support... did I say
please ??
Thanks a bunch,
KGF
