Dear all, First of all, thank you all for your nice posts, I certainly didn't think my naive question would get such a fruitful discussion going.
Perhaps you are interested in my views as a user on the subject: On the topic of quietly ignoring non-up-to-date font packages, I would be in favour of a noisy message like "You don't have package xy, I am using package yz instead, this will damage output quality" or "Your package xy is not up-to-date, I will make do with the present one but this will damage output quality". Of course always with a "[ ] don't show this message next time" so the user who knows what they're doing (or aren't online to update) can work without being interrupted all the time. But the message should be there because nothing is worse than having a problem and not knowing that you do until something goes wrong and you have to check the whole process from beginning to end. (In my case there was a question whether I use any exotic packages in my preamble, for example, so I took the time to check.) On the subject of the grainy font output being really a problem of adobe and inclusion of Type1 fonts not being necessary for nice postscript output, why not optimise the tex files for each output format? If somebody uses Export -> pdf, the tex file is put in the /tmp folder, not damaging any files created with Export -> tex, right? If this is the case, entirely different tex files could be produced for every output format. Of course, it is ugly to think that Export -> tex, dvips, ps2pdf (or pstill) would not produce the same result as Export -> pdf but at the end of the day, the tools for creating ps and pdf all have many options, so the result is undefined anyway. LyX could provide optimised output paths for each format. I'm sure it is very hard to program a sanity check for any collisions in the options the user could have set but IMO the end result would be worth it. Thank you all for your time! Best regards, Andreas Now subscribed to this list. ;o)
