Am Freitag, 26. September 2003 13:04 schrieb Helge Hafting:
> j.heidemeier wrote:
> > 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.
>
> A nice feature of the floats in latex, and currently in lyx,
> is that almost anything may be put inside them. So making "floating"
> a mere property of table/figure/algorithm would be a loss, unless the
> existing floats are kept too.
>
> I have many figure floats that don't contain graphichs insets, instead the
> figure is made up from "unusual" text, tables and math.
>
> One can easily imagine someone making a special table in xfig.
> As an example, the periodic table of elements is probably easier
> to make this way.
> Today, such a table can be put in a table float as
> an external inset - and it will then be listed in
> the list of tables and referred to as "table 17" and similar.
>
> And it is sometimes useful to have a few paragraphs of explanatory
> text to the side of a narrow table/figure. Easy with a float,
> just put a minipage with text to the side of the figure/table,
> inside the float.
>
> Please keep the generic floats even if the table UI gets an overhaul.
>
> Helge Hafting
O.K I didn't explain it cleary enough. I didn't want to withdraw the existence
of "floating objects" in lyx - I wanted to change the perspective how they
were exposed to the authors - they should stay but they should be viewed as
components of the document.
Your examples I would view as e.g. explanatory insets, which should have the
ability to float around to find the best place to be displayed, not as
floating objects with absolutely different contents.
If I write an article with a table, why should I think in the first step: Will
it be longer than one page? If not I make the 2 steps for inclusion for a
float and a table otherwise I make one step for longtables. In the first case
I can include a caption, in the latter case I can only try to play dirty
tricks. I want to write the table, and at the final layout step I want to
decide that table 1 should float, table 2 is a longtable and table 3 should
be in a wrapped by text. You see my point of the "author" perspective?
I hope that this discussion will lead to a better specification of these
problems.
--
Dr. Joachim Heidemeier Tel. +49-30-8903-2780
Fachgebiet II 3.2 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Umweltbundesamt, Bismarckplatz 1 D-14191 Berlin
