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Complaints

Complaints about LyX

Sure you didn't want to give praise? Oh, well..

You can also send an e-mail to the developers list or add an entry to bugzilla! The developers list or bugzilla might also be a better place to report specific problems, where you can get instant feedback and provide additional details if required. For specific feature requests please use FeaturePoll, the above list or bugzilla (or all of them if the fancy takes you).

The freshmeat entry is not being updated. Also, a RSS feed for the news section of the homepage would be nice. bart9h 3 Mar 2008

To be more useful for books, especially on technology, Lyx needs admonitions like SGML has. Heck, Latex needs an extension. If I'm typing Latex, I just program my own, and can do the same in Lyx, but it seems a waste not to have the functionality in the program. I should just be able to pull down and choose Warning or Info. Daniel 25 Jan 2008

I miss something like an 'extending-deadline-plugin'. A must have! Sean Lahler (LyX1.4.3) 5/3/7

It would be nice if there were a way to turn on automatic numbering of equations.

I love the concept of LyX and Scientific Workplace. That's why I will be evil and do a comparison ... which will hopefully NOT alienate the developers from both programs. Check out Lyx versus Scientific Workplace?! Don't be angry, LyX is nearly there ...

LyX is great and will rule the world someday. Still, before that happens, it'll need:

1. Better UI productivity: The UI *has* to be geared towards fast document preparation - I shouldn't have to goto a menu very often. All menus should tell me what the equivalent shortcut keys are. Another idea: to facilitate leaning the UI, when I hit a modifier key, a list of possible next keys should show up in the bottom frame-widget (something like inkscape). Also, I dislike sub windows that steal focus all the time - couldn't all the sub-windows be dock-able instead? Dockable/undockable tool-windows gives people options to set things up the way they like.
2. Document exchange: when writing collaboratively people exchange tex files. Somehow, when I get an updated tex file, I need a way to import the changes back into lyx... lack of this feature will always prevent people from using LyX.
3. Live, synchronized, viewer updates: a lot of people would appreciate it. For instance, checkout Whizzy-tex. Again, the update window should be dockable inside the main LyX window so it does not steal focus. Also, I don't understand why people can't get LyX to do their laundry.

(LyX 1.4.4 - 12/3/07)

I like lyx, and I appreciate some of the improvements of version 1.4.0, but it behaves strangely when writing something in the german letter class. If I change the language to dutch, it complains about english, and it refuses to produce output. Exporting to .tex and running pdflatex shows some error at the opening statement. I don't have the time now to figure it out, so I post this as a complaint. And, I also wasn't able to let it do my laundry. It also refuses export my ideas as C-code. -- Jos

I am using LyX 1.4.0.(It is very good) but it does not allow word completion feature like in vi(Ctrl-p).It would be great if such a feature is incorporated. shekhar

The UI for nesting is pretty clumsy. Also at some point the bug which prevents you from placing two theorem enviroments in a row should get worked out:) other than that great job! 1.3 may 25 2004

Not a complaint this really, just that I cant find a suggestion/request box!

Anyway.. Creating tables is mostly straight out of the box. However, the finer tweaking of tables is a bit of a trial at the moment. It's just taken two of us(wife and I) plus the mailing list regulars (thanks to all) the best part of four hours to figure out how to place nice bullet lists (using itemize*) within a minipage within a table cell within a table, with some text centered, top alignied and with nice equal looking cell padding. The finished product is "almost" as my wife wants it!!!

So my request/wish would be for a better table handling gizmo-thingy and how about an instant preview of tables as per the Math instant preview. If I can help/test - I'm willing. Rob S

(Preview for tables is bug 1234 - JohnLevon)

LyX falls to its knees the moment you do something that isn't exactly what LyX likes, like putting a second title on the coverpage, near the bottom.

Bad copy/paste support with other applications. Great app tho...Thanx!

In response: On Mac OS X, at least, any mouse button other than left and right will paste external text.

(refers to LyX 1.3.7, in Feb- and March-06)

Great tool! Got me back in touch with LaTeX quality without having me diving back into the actual LaTeX code. A few comments:

- Had a problem installing LyX on my comptuer (Dell Inspiron running WinXP): some fonts "not available" when creating the dvi for the User's Guide after first install. Had to re-install, then update MikTeX (using update Wizard) to get it to run properly.

- Would be great to have the possibility to Copy/Paste tables from external sources (e.g. from Excel) with a "good enough" formatting by default

- In nested environments (e.g. Emunerate, Itemize), it would be great to have the ALT-(up or down arrow) keyboard shortcut to change the order of the items, similarly as to the ALT+(right or left arrow) changes the "depth" of the nesting.

- I am still confused on how to modify some parameters in the document classes (e.g. get the name of current Chapter / Section in Header; create an environment of my own)

SB

Lyx is a great tool, behind the UI. However, there are still a lot of points where you can gear up productivity with little effort:

The key bindings really suck - you often have to press a gazillion keystrokes for something that's very very common and just two quick strokes with your pencil. Also, very often you can't even access those that are predefined. Just try entering infinity (m-m 8) on a French keyboard (the numbers require shift).

So, definitely, somebody dearly needs to collect a corpus of lyx files, run statistics of which functions are used most often, and assign 2/3-button keystrokes to them. And yes, modifiers count as a keypresses, especially if they are as crazily located as on an ibook keyboard.

Every year or so, I have been searching the web for math.bind files of fellow users who don't want to be retyping "mathbb{N}" or "Rightarrow" or "m-x layout S-Proof <Enter>" all day long. So far, I haven't found anything elucidating.

So please:

• create an easy-to-find, central place for keyboard modifications and populate it with your very own math.bind diff's to help it take off
• dump all the historically grown lack-of/multi-key assignments and Huffman code them
• think of end user productivity and typical tasks if redesigning something. (the only thing MS word gets right)

I'll gladly email you my own stuff (still need French-ify and Mac-ify it). Tilman Johannes Rothe ( $FirstName . $LastName@web.de)

[PS: I'll second the need to paste external tables, and would also like to convert tables<>text to make editing easy.]

update: Lack of keybindings is much more annoying than too long ones - after all, I can change them. A lot of symbols can be accessed with c-k and c-e in math mode, but by no means all and this is NOT DOCUMENTED. Neither is documented why is is not possible to overwrite some keybindings, like ù (ugrave). But the most important point is: Lyx should work out-of-the-box without fiddling with the keyboard for hours each time you change your OS, keyboards or language.

The only feature that is really (and badly) missing in LyX (1.3.6) is the ability to insert citations and references by a keystroke (like the one used to call the TeX box) and then manually typing the label tag. It is very, very annoying to always have to choose from the list with a mouse while you are typing. The keystrokes for menu items do help, but it would be very helpful if the developers give it a thought...

Also, in the citation list, the items are sorted alphabetically. An option to sort them exactly as they appear in the bibliography would be really nice.

No copy paste between multiple LyX (1.4.3-4) instances. When copy/pasting it is really useful to have the two windows open!

I wish there was a way to collapse some sections of the document and to split the window in halves so that one could see two different parts of the document at the same time. That would make working with long and complex documents much easier.

This is a serious one. I wrote some tales some time ago with Lyx 1.3, now I have Lyx 1.4.2 and Lyx refuses to load them (with no error message). Comparing their sources with 1.4.2 "native" ones I see there are quite a bit differences in format... not that hard to manually fix them, but... a little backwards compatibility wouldn't harm either ;). Or, at least, a format converter every time .lyx file format changes. Please?

LyX is great, but lacking in two areas:

• Integration with other software - copy/paste, import from Word files.
• UI - The UI is archaic. No inline spell-checking, no context menues, no simple keyboard bindings.

How come sometimes, for no good reason at all, Lyx doesn't recognise any input from the keyboard?! SO ANNOYING! I end up having to exit the programe and restart everything. Is there a keystroke I'm accidentally activating that's causing the programme NOT to accept keyboard input??!

Complaints FeaturePoll