Sven Schreiber wrote:
Hi,
I have just almost gone crazy editing a table that was too large to fit
on screen. (Yes I reduced the font/screen zoom to work around, thank
you. No, I won't upgrade my monitor just yet, sorry.)
Together with many other quirks of table editing, especially in the
dialog that seems to be broken in many respects, but also slow
responsiveness to typing, these problems almost made me go back and
write the table in plain latex directly.
I think that is a serious warning sign! I love Lyx, especially because
math and table editing is so much easier than with a (even good) text
editor. IMHO, these are the strenghts that Lyx should expand, and not
all is well in those areas.
I am aware there is a shortage of developers, so priorities have to be
carefully chosen. I am not questioning the usefulness of what is
currently being done, but I do have the feeling that fixing some
long-standing issues receives less attention than introducing new features.
The latter is more fun, and so the situation is perfectly
understandable, and it probably happens with every software project. But
IMHO it is also the reason why the userbase of lyx is far from what it
could be!
This is intended as constructive criticism, please take it as such, not
as any kind of attack. Thank you for your hard work.
I don't recall having any problems with the table dialog (other than
having to remember that some field entries don't take effect if I click
out of the field rather than hitting enter), and response speed to
typing is not a problem (possibly because I tend to work with relatively
small documents), but I definitely agree that it's a PITA having
portions of a table off screen. Without lateral scrolling, the only way
to get to the off-screen parts is with the cursor keys (or the tab
key?), and the cursor key causes the display to jump around in what I
consider to be unpredictable ways.
This is also a problem with math insets that run off the screen. My
biggest wish for LyX right now would be a horizontal scroll bar for math
insets and tables that don't fit on screen. This was discussed on the
list (maybe for math insets?) not too long ago, but I can't find an
enhancement request in bugzilla, so I guess nobody ever submitted it.
/Paul
