Richard Heck wrote:
Martin Vermeer wrote:
On Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 02:40:27PM -0400, Richard Heck wrote:
This looks reasonable to me, though I haven't tested it. (I'm still
obsessing over BibTeX stuff.)
One suggestion: I think CharStyles should by default have an
unobtrusive presentation, NOT with the label showing.
OK, I did that.
Even better would be a layout parameter specifying the
default, as I remember you had. In XML, we use charstyles
as 'short elements' and then we do want to see the labels
by default.
Yes, that would be even better.
The default presentation now (or previously?) gets particularly
ugly if you try to nest them. Making them nest nicely is critical,
it seems to me, to any attempt to replace the Text Settings dialog
with CharStyles, which we are pretty much on the verge of doing
now. (I think it's really just the menu that needs sorting out for
that, as we'd need too many CharStyles to just list them all.)
I would already be happy to replace Noun and Emph. But
apparently you are also thinking of replacing all font attributes? I
would be unhappy with that.
There was a huge discussion on the list sone years ago
when I introduced the charstyle inset. You see, in the LyX
philosophy you want to support lgical character styles, not visual
editing ("finger painting"). This means that
all charstyles should represent some meaning -- the name
of a person, emphasising, 'strong' (like in HTML).
Perhaps this topic should be re-opened. There was some discussion
about it just a few weeks back, and my sense was that J"urgen had been
intending to do something along these lines. The discussion began
because I made the same suggestion independently. The motivation, in
my case, anyway, is that the Text Settings dialog is so broken that I
don't know it can be fixed. (See the many bugs collected under 3893.)
The truth is that, whatever LyX's own philosophy, people do use that
dialog. So I suggested that it should be demolished. That said, one
wouldn't have to have the "finger painting" styles appear with the
logic character styles on the menu. They could appear elsewhere,
perhaps with a stern warning that they are not to be used. ;-)
I see nothing wrong in replacing other text settings with charstyles,
as long as:
* Existing much-used styles, such as "emphasize" and
"foreign language" are preserved. They must be as easy to
use as before. (i.e. "emphasize" may very well become a generic
charstyle defined in a "stdcharstyle.inc" , but there should still be
that userfriendly emphasize button on the toolbar.
* Styles that have a visual representation (emphasize, colors,
bold, underline, font change, . . . should still be rendered
as well as they are today - i.e. use italics for emph, colors for colors,
and so on instead of framed insets. Extraneous frames really break up
the text.
* Today I can mark and emphasize the first 3/4 of a sentence, then
mark and color red the last 3/4 - and the middle 1/2 will then
be both red and emph. This way of working should work in the
future too - even if partial overlap don't fit a "nesting" model. One
solution is to create two "red" insets behind the scenes.
As for loosing the "Text settings" with their "finger-painting"
opportunities, here is an idea:
Get rid of it. The user now have nowhere to go to set "Huge" text
or similiar. All that remains is the few charstyles developers
decide is important enough to be distributed with LyX. "Emph"
would be one such style, and perhaps a few more. I'd like
languages (and the no-spellcheck language) to be available too.
To avoid murder by users who want "Huge" etc., there must
be a way of defining new charstyles. Document-specific or
user-specific. (A user-specific style will be saved in the
document just like a document-specific style, so that the
documents can be exchanged. But it is also saved in
the preferences so it is always available for the user.)
When creating a new charstyle, you give it a name and
pick all attributes to go with it. It might set visual stuff
like color & font, and/or language. It might even
apply a latex command or environment, for the experts.
Now the user can create a "ReallyEmphasize" style using
"Huge" if he wants to. Latex import and old documents
containing "Text settings" can be handled by auto-creating
document-specific styles with the same name as the markup
used.
So users who really want to can still "fingerpaint", but since
they now have to create a style anyway, they might as
well do it properly as that is no more work than "just
applying font settings."
Helge Hafting
