You have a point. Note that the people here can change lyx but not latex, and part of the problem here is how latex works.
no, the point is in which way LyX should support LaTeX packages, should it be for 100% or is a minimal support better than no support.
LyX supports the longtable package in a minimal way, which may be frustrating when you want a caption.
Latex support two kinds of tables. One that is never broken up - this kind may go directly in a document or in some kind of floating object or in a text wrapping construct.
The long table is the other kind, it will be broken up to fit
the pages.
TeX supports only _one_ kind of table, all other are supported by special packages: longtable, tabularx, LTXtable, threeparttable, ...
Other table-related stuff like captions and automatic listing
in a "list of tables" isn't table properties, it is properties of the float object.
it is right, that a float has nothing to do with its contents and only for some historical reasons there exists the _predefined_ float types table and figure.
The table user interface could easily be modified to have a four-way choice of floating/wrapped/nonfloating/longtable as a table property. But then people would wonder why the caption disappears when they switch the table to non-floating - because latex don't support a caption in that case. Well, perhaps the "dirty tricks" mentioned could become part of the conversion from .lyx to .tex
if you use the longtable checkbox in the LyX tabular, you need some dirty tricks to get a caption, which has nothing to do with the floating object. And this dirty tricks are annoying for users, because he thinks, that LyX supports the longtable _with_ caption.
Another problem: A user might want to do stuff like I do - such as putting a figure+a table in the same float. That works fine if you start with an empty float and fills it in with the other stuff. But what should your user do if he started with one of your kind of "table with the floating option checked"? Will there be an easy conversion from "table that is implicitly floating" to a float inset that happens to contain a table? And how about reversing such a conversion - what if there is more stuff in the float than just the table?
the user has to decide, if he wants a caption or not. This is exactly what LyX supports. And it is no problem to change the floating type, especially in my personal LyX, where I can change this on the fly, but in standard LyX, if you want another caption type than the predefined one, then you have to use ERT. But this was not Joachims point ...
Herbert
