Helge Hafting Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:29:38 -0800
Anders Ekberg wrote:
On 9 jan 2006, at 04.41, Bennett Helm wrote:
[...]
Notice that LyX's "New from Template ..." feature is most similar
to Word's "Open a copy" feature (from within the Open dialog):
any file can be a "template", not just specially formatted/saved
documents. For this reason, I think it makes sense to access them
from a dialog similar to the open dialog, though perhaps the
differences between the "Open ..." and "Open from Template ..."
dialogs should be clearer in the dialogs themselves.
Agree. But that does neither solve the problem on how to enter
the LyX.app-bundle, nor on how to prevent default templates from
being modified (provided this is considered a bad thing).
Nothing wrong in modifying a default template - if that is what the
user wishes to do. They may want to set their default papersize,
document language and so on, as well as adding custom letterheads
and such. The distributed templates may be nice as a starting
point, but often not useful exactly the way they are.
Helge Hafting
True, but then there must be a choice at installation: should
"default" templates be over-written (see the discussion on .cls-files
previously in this tread)? That could be a problem if the distributed
"default" templates are modified and there exists a "user-modified"
version also. Which one do you choose?
And we are back on the question on how to access templates in the
LyX.app bundle (on the Mac-platform).
It's a difficult choice: keeping distributed "default" templates in
the bundle and allow user-defined templates to be stored and loaded
from anywhere is probably better for beginners (you have a standard
set of templates that you can't mess up [this also makes it easier to
trouble-shoot]). Power-users will most likely prefer to be able to
modify the "default" templates. However, this is actually possible
also in the case of separate storage for "default" and "user-defined"
templates: simply modify the "default" template, save it somewhere
and replace the "default" template in the bundle with this file using
the Terminal (should be no problem for a power-user).
/Anders
