On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, John Levon wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Amir Karger wrote:
>
> > I agree that it's illogical that when you change docs or paragraphs or
> > whatever the dialogs don't notice.
> >
> > On the other hand, lets say I want to take 10 different paragraphs and add a
> > space after each and make some other changes. (Answer: I should use LaTeX
> > code to change spacing. But let's imagine I can't or don't know how to do
> > that for some reason.) I would probably want to change the paragraph dialog
> > once, then switch to another paragraph and hit Apply again, etc. But I won't
> > be able to do that this way. Character Layout is another place this might
> > happen.
> >
> > So on the one hand, dialogs should update to reflect the current state of
> > whatever paragraph they're in. On the other, they shouldn't. Unfortunately,
> > I don't see a solution, since the two things obviously contradict each
> > other.
> >
> > -Amir
> >
>
> I think Allan's choice (that we should follow the cursor) is the right
> one. I think least surprise comes into play here - paragraphs just don't
> look like separate objects to the user.
Or the alternative is to allow the user to select all 10 of those
paragraphs and open the Paragraph dialog¹, make their changes and Apply
them to all selected paragraphs at once.
¹ What do we put in the Paragraph dialog in that case?
It would seem likely we'd have to either:
1 fill with the first paragraphs details
2 fill with the last paragraphs details
3 fill with some set of average details
4 just use a set of default values
5 disable the dialog
I'm not sure but I think we currently do (1). We can certainly apply
changes to a selection although some changes don't work. For example I
don't seem to be able to select a couple of Description paragraphs and
turn them into a minipage (that just happens to be what I just did a
quick test on) -- what happens is that _all_ the Description paragraphs
get turned into a minipage instead of just the selection.
So for Amir the user can already select a group of paragraphs and do
multiple changes at once. However, it may be a good idea to consider what
values we should fill the dialog with and whether we can fix it so that
all the options in both tabs of the Paragraph dialog apply to only the
selection if one exists. I suspect this could be a problem of calling the
wrong function or having to check if a selection exists and passing that
along. Either way this should be in a core function not in the frontend.
Allan. (ARRae)
