On Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 11:35:10AM -0500, Larry S. Marso wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 04:33:17PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> > >>>>> "Larry" == Larry S Marso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> > Larry> What is the meaning of the new Character dialog box statements
> > Larry> about "toggling"?
> >
> > This was an attempt to cure the problem with the character popup where
> > people complained that the attributes were toggled and not set. Joacim
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Sorry, but "toggled and not set" is as confusing to me as "toggled".
To understand the current actions. Open a lyx document & write "how are you".
Open the character menu. Highlight the word "are" and select series Bold from
the menu. Hit apply, and "are" becomes bold. Highlight the whole line and hit
apply. The whole line becomes bold. Now select Series Medium & click apply
again, and it all goes back to normal.
Now click the "toggle on all these" button. Select "are", make it bold. Works
just like before. Now select the whole line & click on OK. Oops! Now "how" and
"you" are bold, but "are" is not. That's what the toggle button does. Note
that this gets more confusing if you have, say, series bold and shape italic
selected. If you don't have the toggle button active, then any text that's
highlighted becomes bold & italicized when you click OK. If you *do* have the
toggle button active, then any selected text has its boldness attribute and
its italics attribute toggled (switched from on to off & vice versa). Which
could lead to very confusing combinations of plain text, just bold, just
italic, & bold and italic.
Incidentally, before the latest patch, the character popup always acted as if
the "toggle on all these" button was selected. Which made it very confusing.
Now, if that button is not selected, things act more like a word processor
user would expect them to. Whatever attributes you've selected, like bold &
italics, are set (not toggled) for the text you highlighted.
To make things more confusing, size is "never toggled". That means that
whatever size you select, when you hit Apply, the text you've highlighted will
change to that size. If you select "are", make it small & hit apply, then
select "how are you" and hit apply again, the whole line will be small. "are"
won't be "toggled" back to some other size.
The "misc" stuff, OTOH, always toggles. So if you put "are" in tex mode, then
select the whole line & hit apply, then "how" and "you" will be in tex mode
but "are" won't be anymore.
I have to agree that this remains confusing, but believe it or not it's less
confusing than it used to be. A couple thoughts:
(1) "toggle on all these" is a bad name for the button. It's easy to think
that "toggle on" means "turn on". Which is the behavior when that button
*isn't* selected! "toggle all of these" or "toggle these attributes" would be
(slightly) better.
(2) Larry or anyone else: if you have ideas for making this better, please say
them now! That includes either ideas for better description strings, or bigger
changes.
(2a) one drastic technique would be that "bold" always always makes things
bold. You can only unmake bold by selecting medium. Not good because people
might not realize medium is the opposite of bold.
(2b) a *slightly* less drastic technique would say "bold" makes the whole text
either bold or not bold. So if *any* of the highlighted text is not bold, make
the whole text bold. If *all* of the highlighted text is bold, make it all not
bold. This is perhaps *slightly* intuitive. If you're selecting a piece of
text, it's likely because you want the whole piece of text to have similar
attributes.
(3) Both 2a and 2b suffer from the fact that there's just one apply button for
all of these attributes. That leads to the possiblity for lots of confusion
when more than one attribute is selected at once. What will the apply button
do then? Word doesn't have this problem. OTOH, if you want to make lots of
things both bold and italic, you need to make each one bold, then make it
italic. (Well, actually, you just define a style.) People probably wouldn't
want to get rid of the ability to set given characteristics in the character
menu & then highlight different portions of text & change each in the same
way.
> Toggled leaves me boggled.
Obviously a complicated issue. And if you don't understand it, having used LyX
for a long time, how will new users feel? Ideas?
-Amir
