thank you for your kind reply and additional information. even with my limited experience, i saw a chance to offer ideas i thought would be of value.
however, i received comment from helge hafting of norway who has given me a perspective i had not considered. and that is that it is free software and not for sale. hence, there is no need to try to achieve competitive advantage. as the documentation is very clear with respect to how things work. there is no need to make changes, other than the note in section 4.4.1 of the user's guide left by one of your own team members and of which i'm in complete agreement.
i've had a rethink and now believe that competition has no place in the world of free software. the purpose of development appears to be vastly different from that of commercial software. like yourself, i suspect that many developers choose to do so because it's a problem that is of interest to them. that's something i had not previously considered. i don't know why i didn't think of that because i do the same thing. still, i like the lyx product very much and intend to use it. i appreciate everyone who spent time reading my email, forwarding it, and responding to it.
if you already received a copy of an earlier version of this email, i apologize for sending a second. i cannot tell whether some addresses were accepted and some bounced or whether all bounced. i checked closely to discover the bounce is because you don't accept html format. i understand the security implications, so i will send this as plain text.
regards,
jim solley
Martin Vermeer wrote:
Just some quick comments on what is in principle an important matter (although the formatting of the message illustrates how to effectively _un_invite comment :-( ):
1) Yes, comparing LyX with oth^W word processors is perhaps a bad idea. It is a document processor and becoming all the time more so.
2) It is not quite true that LyX (and not even LaTeX, which was inspired by an older piece of software 'Scribe') invented the use of 'style sheets'. It is also not true that, e.g., MS Word has them added as an afterthought. It was there from day one.
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/Teaching/470/markup1.html
What _is_ true is that somehow these style sheets don't get used much, except by users that have been trained to use them and/or have previous LaTeX experience. Most naive users stick to 'finger painting'. Wondering why that is so is a legitimate question...
It is also not quite true that LyX/LaTeX represents the latest and greatest in 'semantic document editing'; actually that place would be taken by XML, as LaTeX is still a strangely old-fashioned, funny mix of semantic mark-up and printed page description. However, finding decent visual editors to easily manipulate such XML -- or even LaTeX -- is a bit of a problem, as the ones that exist are poor, expensive and/or non-existent. In this sense, LyX is certainly unique and, with work, can be made even more so (this is one of my motives for diving into LyX/XML!).
- Martin
