On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 11:15:58PM +0100, John Levon wrote: > On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 04:56:38PM +0300, Martin Vermeer wrote: > > > * src/frontends/xforms/forms/form_paragraph.fd: Implement short > > versions (to go to TOC) for captions and sectioning headers. > > What UI would people like to see for this (mock-ups would be especially > useful) ? And then we can consider how to do it. > > I'm having trouble thinking of a truly intuitive inset-based method
Finally someone asking the right question!
The reason why we want the short title to be an inset, is so we can do
all the things with it that we do with other text insets (and the main
text): insert other insets, math, fonts, references, ... whatever.
Without having to use raw LaTeX.
However, it should be a collapsible (and usually collapsed) inset
because it should not be a part of the regular flow of the text. Like
footnotes and margin notes and floats, they are written at a certain
point in the text ("anchor location"), but on output, do not become part
of the text there.
So the simplest solution is a collapsible text inset at the start of a
section (sub*(section|paragraph)), caption) layout. Keeping the layout
mechanism for sections etc. as it is. I hope to come up with something
to show soon (the C++ gods allowing).
[One elegant idea I had at some point was making the section number
itself (a layout "label" now) into a button, which expands into a
shorttitle inset on click. This is intuitive in the sense, that only
sections with numbers go to the TOC. The inset object could be made
"self-numbering", i.e., handling the code for generating these numbers,
which currently is somewhat messy from what I've seen.
The idea to make layout labels into insets could be taken further, e.g.,
to cover the "description" and "list" layout labels as well, which are
now special-cased in a somewhat ugly way.]
This means, providing mechanisms for
1) limiting the occurrence of these insets only to places where they
make sense, and
2) making sure that on output of a section header e.g., we get
\section[shortheader]{section header text} with [shortheader] inserted
at the right point, and left out if empty. (Q.: should absence of short
title be indicated by absence of inset, or empty inset?)
How to do both these things is mystical to me still. I have however a
design (in my patch) for how to represent these insets in the .lyx file
format, and how to mark layouts in the .layout files for allowing short
titles to be given. Still waiting for comment on those :-)
However, current CVS contains "first tries" for section and caption
insets, not enabled yet. I don't know precisely what was the motive for
writing these. As Allan remarked, a section inset could be made to
include all the text following it to the next, and made collapsible,
giving us in effect "outline mode" of emacs/MS Word. But this is a
separate issue perhaps to be left outside this discussion now.
Martin
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