Re: markdown 2 man, was Re: Git Community Book

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Abdelrazak Younes <younes@lyx.org> wrote:

What is really powerful is TeX. As to LyX, it is leaky abstraction over it. I have never been able to use without ending up saying, it is so much easier and much more powerful to use Latex than trying to do the same with LyX. Of course, LyX looks much better nowadays than used to be, so I decided to give it another try, and here is my fifteen minutes experience with it.

First, I tried to open FAQ.lyx that you attached to your previous email, and here is what I see:

=== /tmp/FAW.lix is from a different version of LyX, but the lex2lex script failed to covert it. ===

This is result was received with two LyX versions that I tried: LyX Version 1.4.3 (21/09/2006) LyX 1.5.5 (Sun, May 11, 2008)

Now, I see, that your FAQ was created with LyX 1.6.0svn, which is not released yet. So, I hope that this issue will be correctly before it will be released. Otherwise, anyone opening document with 1.6.0 will make it unaccessible to users of previous versions.

Then I tried to use Formatted reference and everything looks okay until I tried to generate DVI file, where I was welcome but the following error: === Paragraph ended before \@prettyref was complete. ===

What is \@prettyref? What is wrong with my paragraph? Actually, my paragraph is fine, it is just when you use Formatted reference, you should know that it is implemented using prettyref TeX package, which requires three letter prefix in name of each label. Why did not LyX warn me about that? BTW, is really prettyref is the best package for this job anyway? I remember some TeX experts recommended some other packages for references.

Finally, I still have not figured out how to the same what AsciiDoc does: Chapter #, $CHAPTER_NAME It does not look like that LyX can produce references in this format.

The I tried to insert some verbatim text, and I cannot find the standard way
to do that in LyX. Sure, I can press CTRL-L and type in TeX:
\begin{verbatim}
        # git itself (approx. 10MB download):
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
        # the linux kernel (approx. 150MB download):
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
\end{verbatim}

but I don't think that having a lot TeX code is going to help us with having good formatted HTML version.

BTW, it is really annoying to see TeX code displayed in proportional fonts and formatted with full adjustment. For instance, the last line was displayed like this:

$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git

Another rather surprising experience for those who got used to HTML: Left-click on a reference produces its properties, while the right click means to go to the label, and once you jump on it, there is no way to jump back (at least, I was not able to find how to do that).

Well, I wrote all above only because I hope that LyX will continue to improve. It looks much better now than before. Yet, I will rather stay with plain text editors for now. Some of them are much more powerful than Notepad :)

Dmitry