Bo Peng wrote:
> Why can not you think of bold as another emph style?? Italic and bold
> are methods to emphasize.
Agreed. Also small caps is a method to emphasize. Color as well, and text
size, and font family. And which method is chosen is actually defined in such
macros as \emph or \noun.
> Let us put it in this way: people wants different emph styles that are
> commonly provided as bold and italics (or emph, or additionally
> \underline) by other word processors . Lyx has emph but not bold, and
> that is confusing and inconvenient (I am talking about toolbar/menu,
> not shortcuts). To new users, lyx has ONLY one emph style.
Let's say two (noun and emph). But again, LyX has emph, not bold, not italics,
not underline in the toolbar. Depending on your document class, it might as
well output something completely different. What do you tell the users then:
that emph is broken with this specific class? It's not.
Nothing speaks against a document class that defines \emph to output bold
text. I would, for instance, chose this if I'd write a presentation class,
since italics is not very readable in presentations.
What now? Take out the bold button and add an italics one?
Again, if you come to the conclusion that the font attributes should be
accessible easier (which I'm still not convinced about), then the solution
would not be the bold button, but rather an additional "font styles" toolbar
that contained a bold, italics, smallcaps and an underline button.
> Lyx has some good ideas about charstyle but charstyle is not quite
> usable now. So, in 1.5.x, we provide \textbf, \emph, and \none etc. In
> 1.6.x, we will make charstyle easy to use so users can actually
> configure \textbf, \emph etc, using CharStyle Strong, Emph, Nonu.
> There is no reason to reject textbf if you agree with the usability of
> \strong. In the end, \strong is 99.9% times \textbf.
Actually, I don't really agree with the usability of "strong". This is not
really semantic markup, but some kind of "make it look like semantic".
Semantic is something like \emph ("emphasize this, be it italics, bold or
whatever"), \noun ("this is the way proper names should look like" -- I have
defined this to be not at all emphasized, i.e. roman upright, in many
documents btw) or \command or \keyword.
Anyway, if new users are really confused that there is emph and not bold, we
hae a documentation problem. However, I seem to remember that this specific
issue is/used to be documented rather well (which is why I remember that this
very much convinced me when I was a new user; I didn't know anything about
LaTeX or semantic markup back then, BTW).
Jürgen
