I wanted an extra border around a table, so I put it in a
rectangular box. The idea was to get the same effect
as \fbox{ ... } around the table.At first I struggled with this - boxes unfortunately seems to have a width of their own. (I can see how that is useful in a number of other cases of course.)
I then discovered that after setting the
type to "rectangular" instead of "no frame"
allows me to specify the mysterious "inner box:none"
which magically enables setting the width to some
multiple of "width". A bit tricky, but 1\width gives
me exactly what I want which is nice. Unfortunately, the GUI seems to think that 1\width
is really narrow, so the big wide table inside gets
squashed in lyx. It'd be better if lyx did this a bit
more latex-like and simply didn't change the width
of the box content in this case. The squased view looks bad.
A smaller problem is the tricky way this dialog box works.
Some choices resets others, i.e. going from "rectangular"
to "no frame" also resets the inner box from "none" to
"parbox". That kind of behaviour is fine with me, _if_
"no frame+no innerbox" really is unsupported. (I still think lyx should support this configuration, as
\makebox can do exactly that. The combination isn't "useless.")
However, there are other cases where choices simply get hidden. "no inner box" is unavailable unless some framing is selected. Instead, it should be available but reset the "type" as necessary. similar for the width specification "width" - it should reset the inner box to "none" when used instead of being invisible. This is consistent with how "type" works. Remember, users don't always fill out dialogs in top-down order, particularly not when making changes to something existing.
If you disagree with me about showing all choices all the time, how about at least showing the "impossible" options grayed-out instead of hiding them completely? Seeing that it is possible to get the "width" specification for box width is very helpful, even if I have to make some other changes in order to activate it.
Helge Hafting
