H. Voss schrieb: > j.heidemeier schrieb: >> At the moment longtables really suck :-(.
>yesss ... :-) >Write the whole longtable in pure LaTeX code into a single >file (not as LyX file, only text). >Then you can use in an esay way a caption. In Lyx do a >Insert->file Well, that is only a short term solution. Meanwhile I think, the real problem is, that the current table handling in lyx is so difficult because it does not follow the LyX principle: * Make standard tasks as easy as possible and discourage bad habits from Office programs. So I'd like to give a brief sketch of my ideas and I hope it could start an improvement process for tables in lyx. 1. The idea in Lyx is to take a strictly document centric view and delegate the typesetting to LaTeX - which normally can handle it much better. To this extent the author is forced to consequently use different paragraph formats and to abandon the visual markup habits of Office-users. 2. So the abstraction view of LyX authors is structure related. It contains chapters, paragraphs, images ... tables - and neither the typewriter view of Office users nor the abstract boxes of TeX's typesetting. The latter translation has to be made by LyX "under the hood", whereas in LaTeX this translation lies in the LaTeX code, which requires a much higher knowlege of possible users compared to lyx - at least for standard cases. 3. LaTeX has the ability to use standard layout formats also in tables: it is the \newcolumtype mechanism in array.sty and allows to override the standard column definition with another format with mulitcolumn. If a few table formats (e.g. decimal aligned col., multirow cells and normal texts) were predefined and could be assigned via the user interface, this would be similar to the way the rest of LyX works. Currently LyX allows this approach with the "special" (sic!) attribute but does not enforce it. The current table formatting is more at the "typesetting level" of Office-Programms. 3. The main exposure of the Floats is misleading from the authors perspective. Floats are TeX's typesetting perspective. For the author tabular and longtable are similar - not floating figures or floating tables. The ability to float in the final layout should be handled as a feature of the respective document entity - the correct LaTeX syntax has to be assured by the LyX2LaTeX backend. 5- The typography of tables is nicely described in ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/info/german/tabsatz/tabsatz.ps So a good lyx table should be able to handle straightforward at least the simple cases in that document. 4. Now I'll try a rough lyx-table description from an authors perspective: A lyx-table consists of: a) 0 or 1 caption b) a list of table entry which might be identical to a) c) a continuation caption for longtables which might be identical to a) d) 0 or 1 topruler e) one or several headerrows, which may be repeated in longtables f) 0 or 1 midruler g) the actual table contens h) 0 or 1 bottomruler. Vertical lignes should be possible but deprecated. The whole table shuld be wrapped in a container tag, giving the type of the table, i.e. standard, longtable or floating table ..... The lack of such a container tag is the source of the caption/longtable problem. Well, enough for now. Yous -- Dr. Joachim Heidemeier Tel. +49-30-8903-2780 Fachgebiet II 3.2 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Umweltbundesamt, Bismarckplatz 1 D-14191 Berlin
