I tried lyx after some long time again found lyx on an up to date level
compared to former versions - thanks to the developers!
Something that did not following common logik in the past and actually
as well is the handling of whitespace always following any punctuation
mark like .,;:--?!]}) etc. You easily can miss it and lyx does not
care about.
I think, that under all normal circumstances any punctuation mark MUST
be followed by a whitespace and I think it would be a good idea to let
that check and make lyx if one forgets it. Such an intelligent feature
is comparable to the deletion of more than one whitespaces between two
words, where lyx takes care and a correction.
There are some cases where a point will not be followed by whitespace,
for instance the point operator in Java that separates objectnames from
methods and may be there are some more. So, anyway it should be possible
to eliminate whitespaces for special purposes. But the default should be
a single whitepace following any punctuation mark.
I posted this reflection to the user list - so the former text is a copy
of that text. User lists are mostly pools of sceptic people and clearly
proposals are posted to be discussed controversially. There had been
some -- largely critical -- responses.
The claim from SteveT for such a whitespace automatism as an option only
is understandable.
The list of Julian Stacey with exceptions from the rule of whitespace
after a punctuation mark is impressive:
"Typical names that would be a drag to delimit:
- From lyx source hierarchy ;-)
RELEASE-NOTES Sourcedoc/Makefile.bak
examples/eu_adibide_lyx-atua.lyx lyxlayout_ptr_fwd.h
src/frontends/qt2/.deps/QBranch.Plo
- From eg SCCS
main.c,v
- From /etc of FreeBSD
periodic/daily/405.status-ata-raid
- Random others
/pub/FreeBSD/ports/graphics/net-p2p/dctc/files/patch-src::mydb.c
/pub/FreeBSD/branches/i386/-current/
www.de.freebsd.org/platforms/ia64/$enbase;/platforms/ia64/montecito-die.html
The posting of Jan Engelhardt also articulates some constraints:
"But there should be no whitespace in, e.g., "e.g." and abbreviations
like T.L.A.P.D. (knowingly that they are often written as TLAPD anyway)."
No, I think the user needs to take care of it because no program
can automatically decide whether it is T.L.A.P.D. or T. L. A. P. D"
I did a statistic of a normal mathematical/physical text with formulas
about 150 pages DIN A 4 without page numbers and top-lines, about 300
pages 9x6", and got a count of 74345 words and 508797 characters with
whitespace and 438973 characters without whitespace. I found 3472 points
with whitespace, 4008 commas with whitespace, 58 ? with whitespace and
39 ! with whitespace. I have not counted the patterns given by Julian,
but all of the internet URLs are in the bibtext file, say separated from
lyx text. Might be that some of the other patterns given above are put
into the lyx text as program code, so that they also will be separated
from code. Formulas ar4e also separated from plain text. So I argue that
this exceptions described above are minor compared to that 7578 hits,
but have not tried to count. I would estimate that such a whitespace
automatism can free me from thinking about the layout in 95% or more of
the texting process and only in some more or less exotic cases I have to
think about a whitespace.So I think the statistic is with me.
Andre Poenitz wrote: "Not to mention the code complication that it makes
it undesirable from a developer's point of view..."
I did not find Andre Poenitz on the developers list and I am not a lyx
developer as well.I only did some numeric algorithmic and embedded
programming. Well, I would say compared to nroff, troff or groff lyx is
very, very undesirable from a developper's point of view. If you like
that desirable forms of text processing I can recommend you plan 9,
where nroff and troff are still tools of the trade and that's where I
find back to the amusement of my youth! I am not familiar with the
processing of text and all that GUI stuff, but I admire such code and
the developers. I kow very well that programming and any code change is
a pure adventure! But undesirable?
I actually downloaded the source of lyx, but as I am not familiar with
the source I do not believe that I can find the point of entry for such
a change to experiment with. I would appreciate some hints where to find
the package for such a change out of the impressive and overwhelming
class list or some hints? Again - I am not a real hacker of such stuff
and awaiting some ill success but I am interested to analyse that
particular problem just because of the interesting programming logic
connected with the problem and the fun to play around with something I
find desirable.
May be there is someone more skilled than I am and can give such a
feature a try in a coming version quite easily as an odd job? Than I am
not angry about.
Best regards
bitu
