On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:22:44 +0200
Helge Hafting <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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.
Yes... we need the three-box model.
> * 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.
But this is "fingerpainting"... aka "why the * would you want to do that?"
Remember semantics: a charstyle should _mean_ something. How often do
you want to make two overlapping pieces of text stand out in two different
ways?
> 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
This pretty much sums up my ideas too.
- Martin
