Le 11/12/2015 22:47, Enrico Forestieri a écrit :
On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 06:52:19PM +0000, Guillaume Munch wrote:
Dear list,
I noticed various issues with the following new feature:
Splitting of consecutive environments has been reworked and enhanced
which is marked as "undocumented" on the wiki. I was waiting for a
documentation to be sure that I understood what was going on before
explaining my issues with it.
This was documented at e521ee7b but the documentation was mostly removed
at 1c71f1ea.
Silently losing work is very bad. I hope that you were not discouraged
by the loss and will find the time to reintroduce them.
Is there a procedure to follow with respect to the documentation to
avoid that sort of things in the future?
First, I think it is a very good idea to make this more simple and
intuitive.
I attached a lyx file describing the problems.
Please, next time try to write directly in the post your observations
as this makes it easier replying. For now I will make a copy of the
points I want to reply to.
Yes, sorry, thanks for doing that.
• Defect: The following character (parbreak separator) is not a line
break (the symbol is misleading). Obtained with Enter Enter Enter.
It breaks a line and introduces a blank line afterwards. Here an
unobtrusive symbol is required (because it is also used for other
reasons explained in the removed documentation) and it is not simple
deciding what to use.
Well in that case I find obtrusive that it looks so close to a usual and
common linebreak inset.
I thought that using the same symbol you find on
the Enter key could convey this info. The symbol is heavier than the
line break symbol and easily distinguishable from it.
I agree that after having learned about it, I could distinguish them.
This is going to confuse users nevertheless.
You are welcome to propose suggestions.
Yes. I suggest something that conveys the meaning, rather than the
output in the LaTeX source. What is the meaningful purpose of this new
separator? As I understand it at the moment, a variation on the
horizontal bar of the plain separator would be better.
• Enhancement: If we are going to use this as the intuitive way to
separate environments, then it would be nice if the previous
environment (here itemize) was re-introduced automatically.
This is going to replace the separate environment, which did not
re-introduce the previous environment. Then, this is a personal
preference and as such it is not going to be shared by everyone.
Moreover, there are other ways to do what you want and that will
use a more appropriate plain separator (as you also discovered).
I also had the impression that the plain separator was more appropriate,
and doing Alt+P Enter is going to be my new way of breaking
environments. This has become an essential function now that the
separator environment is gone. I now see that a menu entry is available
in the contextual menu and the edit menu, I hope this will be enough.
Maybe the text could be a bit clearer than "Start new environment" since
it is also used for splitting an existing environment (with no strong
opinion about that).
• Defect: They tend to accumulate and they are redundant because there
is only one additional '\n' in the LaTeX source. The problem is the
one can add one before another. Thus, two such consecutive chars
should be merged as a single one, like it is done for spaces in LyX.
There were a lot of problems to be solved and this one was escaping me.
Thank you for pointing it out. I will try to address it when I will find
time (and motivation) to work again on LyX. Unfortunately, I will be
unavailable the next weeks.
Thanks.
• Defect: Converting a LyX 2.1 file into 2.2 produces a lot of these
characters in places where they do change anything to the output
(I think this is a bug). This makes the choice of symbol all the
more confusing because users are going to think LyX 2.2 introduces
line breaks in their documents when converting.
Please, find in the bug tracker the relevant discussion about this
(now I don't remember anymore the bug number). In a nutshell, it was
requested that the output should not change. However, all this work
was motivated by the fact that LyX was introducing spurious par breaks
in unwanted places. For leaving unchanged the output (now that this
spurious par breaks are avoided), when the file is converted they are
to be forcibly reintroduced. This is done by the parbreak separator.
The fact that you find that nothing changes in the output means that
it actually works (and thus is not a bug but a feature).
The users are simply made aware that previous LyX versions were
silently introducing par breaks that now are explicitly indicated.
Ok, this is very good.
All of this was explained in the removed documentation.
What you just explained above is important and deserves to be explained
in the NewInLyX22 wiki as well, IMO. You did more than rework the
separators.
• Defect: I do not understand (as a user) the difference with the
plain separator obtained with Alt+P Enter (which looks better IMO):
The plain separator is simply a separator that does not introduce a
blank line in the output. This is complementary to the parbreak one,
which should take the place of the old separator environment that
introduced a blank line after itself. So, in the places where you
were using the separator environment, you should use the parbreak
separator if you want a blank line afterwards, otherwise you can use
the plain separator (see the removed documentation).
I saw what it did to the output very well. But I don't understand where
I would need this (I'll have a look at the explanations in the
documentation) but more importantly I don't understand why this is so
important that it must be bound to Enter.
• Defect: I did not know about Alt+P Enter until very recently so
this feature has a discoverability issue, that Enter Enter Enter
appears to solve to me. Now that the separator environment is gone,
the discoverability is an issue.
This is not my doing but I also find it cumbersome having to use
Alt+P Enter and I have the following in my user.bind file:
\unbind "M-p Return" "environment-split"
\bind "S-Return" "environment-split"
such that I can simply use Shift Enter to break the current environment
and re-introduce the same one again.
I see that this binding is free. I vote for setting this as the default
(of course there's no need to remove Alt+P M).
Thank you for your quick and patient reply.
Guillaume
