Thomas CLive Richards wrote: [snip]
5.- Users *should* be able to fine tune *all* the details about the typesetting. Boxing users in so they can only use what *you* think is good type setting is (IMHO) plain silly. I personally can't find any styles in the pretty small style list which exactly matches the style i need. I should be able to set everything, like the whitespace above and below titles, whether chapters/sections/subsections start on a new page, whether tables are set out on a seperate page, and a whole lot more. Again, forcing users to use *your* style of typesetting just makes users unhappy with the results.
The use of "your" here is misleading. The LyX developers do not set
the paragraph environments, they come from whoever writes the LaTeX
styles. A style editor would be a nice feature, but it would also be a lot
of work.
Yeah, ok, maybe "your" was not the right word. and perhaps tuning all the features is also a bad idea. However, tuning some of the more important ones shouldn't be too hard, surely? things like section numbering style, font size and type & indent for the different sections...
There is already quite a bit you can do - font size, for example is included in document settings (though you only get a choice of 10, 11 or 12 points - if you want anything bigger, you need to use a class like poster or manually fine-tune the whole of your document). Expanding the rangeof font faces has been on the table for a long time, but it's a larger piece of work than it looks - LyX just comes up with the fonts that are common to just about any TeX installation, and adding more fonts would require it to search the user's TeX directory to see what had been installed. As far as I can tell (C++ is beyond me!) it wouldn't be rocket science, but it would be donkey work.
Numbering style is still handled by the document class, though it wouldn't be hard to over-ride it in a similar way to bullet styles, I suppose. Again, indentation of headings is automatically done by the document class.
It seems you're looking for one of two things. Either your needs would be best met by some kind of style editor, so you could create LyX layout files on the fly (which would, I agree, be very nice) or you need the ability to micro-format everything as you type. In the latter case, LyX is probably not the best program for you, and I suspect that anything based on LaTeX wouldn't be either. You either need a very clever frontend to TeX which doens't rely on LaTeX, or you need a good conventional word processor (e.g. OpenOffice) or DTP program (Scribus is getting there slowly, though it's still not in the same league as the big commercial DTP programs).
Robin
-- "Some guy breaking into a government computer system and wreaking havoc makes for a more interesting movie plot than some guy writing device drivers. It's hard to work in a good 10-minutes car chase scene with some guy who writes device drivers..." - tjc, post to LWN
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
