Joost Verburg wrote:
William R. Buckley wrote:
Well, the open source tool Maxima has no problem following
a Windows shortcut in its browsing function. So, your position
is therefore that LyX should be less than it might be, when other
open source tools have no problem with a simple if arcane
function.
On my system it's not even possible in Microsoft Word :) Does this
Maxima tool use the standard Windows dialog?
What about Notepad? Are you talking about a shortcut to a file or to a
directory?
On my XP Home box, every program I've tested that uses the Windows file
open dialog can follow a shortcut (.lnk) to a directory. So either
something is amiss with your system, or maybe you have some registry
setting mucking things up.
Anyway, I just did some digging, and I suspect the offending behavior in
the LyX dialogs may be a function of something goofy in the call to the
Windows file-open dialog. Initially, I found it odd that File -> Open
and Insert -> Graphics -> Browse would invoke identical dialogs (other
than the dialog's title) that acted differently. On my system at least,
File -> Open follows shortcuts to directories and files, whereas I -> G
-> B just stuffs the path of the .lnk file into the file field. Then I
realized the dialogs are not quite identical: F -> O comes with the file
type defaulting to .lyx, whereas I -> G -> B comes with the file type
defaulting to "all files".
If I change the file type in the F -> O dialog to "all files" and try to
follow a link, even a link to a LyX file, I get an error message. The I
-> G -> B dialog has no option other than "all files" for file type, but
you can fake a file type in the Windows file-open dialog by putting
*.extension (e.g., *.png) in the file name field. Sure enough, if I do
this the dialog follows links.
This behavior is not replicated in either Notepad or NoteTab (the latter
a Windows-native FOSS replacement for NoteTab). So I suspect that it's
not intrinsic to the file-open dialog, but rather the result of some
subtle difference in the flags used to call the dialog.
/Paul
