Bo Peng wrote:
So if we ship LyX with built-in "emph" and "strong" charstyles, then
the users wanting bold and italic gets what they want. And we
still have the advantages of charstyles - a special document
class can override "strong" to do a color trick, for example.
1. charstyle is more difficult to use than font change. For example,
if you have abcdef in a charstyle, and you want to change all or part
of them to normal style, several steps are needed. Toggle-bold etc are
much easier in this case. So, for simple cases, font-change is easier
and should be preferred.
Nothing stops us from having toggles on our built-in
charstyles.
2. charstyles are not ready for 1.5.0. There is no default charstyle
defined anywhere, and there is no easy way to create one. Do you guys
really expect a normal user to hand-edit a .layout file?
Not at all. Which is why I suggested that LyX ships with
"strong" and "emph" charstyles predefined. _We_ can
put those two into the .layouts we distribute so that
the users won't have to! They will only need that
hand-editing if they want _more_ charstyles.
My impression is that charstyles works in 1.5, there is just no
user-friendly way of adding them. This does not prevent
developers from adding some common styles.
3. Bold is needed. In many cases, more than one emphasis style are
needed so \em alone is not enough. In case that there is no \strong,
\textbf should be provided. (My opinion is that both should exist).
With emph and strong, you do have a bold. Unless you
redefine strong - but if you do that, then you're able to
define some other bold.
The typical use for a different "strong" is if the font
in use is bold already though. Such as in the
headings - they are already bold.
4. Bold is commonly used so all word processors put them upfront.
Jurgen argued that lyx is not a word processor, but that was nonsense.
Which is why I suggest to distribute a "strong" that in
all standard classes _will_ be bold. Problem solved - users
then have an emphasis stronger than "emph".
I don't think calling it "strong" instead of "bold" really will
scare people away. That will just be one of the many little
differences in LyX, the lack of rulers and linebreaking that doesn't match
output surely is a bigger thing to get used to. . .
5. Trying to force users to use lyx/latex in a certain way is wrong.
Not able to mark a word bold in 5 minutes is enough for a new user to
give up lyx.
Possibly. Which is why I suggest a predefined "strong"
that indeed does "bold" when using the distributed .layouts.
Stick it on the toolbar (like emph) for easy access. If the user s
don't understand the word "strong", then perhaps they
understand the bold-looking button. :-)
Helge Hafting
