>>>>> "John" == John Levon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> but now, the way that used to work, with much less effort, doesn't. John> and ? John> sorry, the lyx interface is not going to stagnate just because John> you like it that way... Could it be that you are a bit grumpy today, John? %-] >> I'm not sure what a glue lenght is. If it's in/cm/etc., it's the >> whole point; if not, I have no idea. John> I think this is a REALLY good example why we need better John> interfaces, thankyou for proving my point succinctly. I'm not so sure about that, in fact. I was actually thinking since a few days about proposing to go back to the good old "1cm" text input. Here is why. 1/ what Richark and dochawk said is certainly true. Being forced to use the mouse to enter lengths is not very nice. And even if xforms had keyboard support for choice widgets, it would remain a bit painful (remember you will need a different keyboard accellerator for each choice widget!) 2/ The there is glue. Most people do not know what this is about. But should they? As I see it, people should be first of all encouraged to use symbolic lengths like medskip/bigskip/whatever. This is because (1) they have correct glue and (2) it is the whole point of WYSISWYM vs WYSIWYG. So the cases where people enter explicit lengths is (as far as I can tell) when they need an explicit _fixed_ length. I am not sure that the case where people need 1cm-0.5cm+0.5cm is common enough that we want to design the interface around it. What I am saying basically is that the problem you are trying to solve is real, but the current solution may not be the best. Several things I have been thinking about: 1/ instead of the current 'guess default unit based on paper size' hack, it would be better to let the user choose his default unit in Preferences. 2/ if there is a default unit, we could have a single text entry field where people could enter either '1', '1cm' '1cm+0.5in' or whatever. This is good for power users. 3/ so, how could we help people who are lost with these things. One could have a small button near each length entry field which would open a length picker dialog with lots'o widgets to guide them. What I think is that, like what Larry Wall said about perl 'simple tasks should be easy and difficult tasks should be possible' (or something like that). Having 6 widgets for each glue length value has a price: it takes valuable screen space and confuses the user (in the sense that other things become less visible). So we should not overdo the interface. Feel free to disagree. JMarc
