On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 12:56:05PM +0200, Michael Schmitt spake thusly: > > Martin Vermeer wrote: > > >On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 10:18:24AM +0200, Michael Schmitt spake thusly: > > > > > >So you would like to see a possibility to assign a user defined name > >(like "English") to a branch, and then separately link a colour to > >that name? Certainly possible; one step extra for the user. And you > >have to include the name-to-colour lookup table into the document (I > >believe John does that for change tracking by author). > > > Yes. The extra step might be unnecessary if you write a document in > different languages. But I can imagine many other cases where it is not > so trivial to determine the semantics of a text by its color. > (Especially if you pass the doc to another person who does not know your > color scheme).
OK. > >I admit that it will get messy if you want to combine "real" colours > >with branches in the same text. But it is doable. > > > How? LyX should have clearly distinguishable markers for colors, > languages, changes, and branches. It depends on what you mean by "clearly distinguishable". In this implementation "branch" is clearly different from "color" as I explained. But on-screen, the use of colour will be overloaded, which might confuse people even if formally not a problem. In practice the problem is smaller than it seems: in most documents by far, coloured pieces of text are short and far apart. Colour is a tacky means of emphasising and rarely a good idea. > Another idea that comes into my mind: Would it be possible to merge the > "branch" concept (maybe not in its current state) with the "note" and > "margin note" insets and maybe also with the "comment" paragraph layout? > For instance, by some base inset class "DeactivatableInset"? I.e. we > could have a class hierarchy like this: > > DeactivatableInset > NoteInset > MarginNoteInset > BranchInset > > At run-time, the user can define branch types like "EnglishBranch", > "GermanBranch", etc. and each BranchInset object has one of these types. > In the document dialog, insets can be activated/deactivated on the level > of DeactivableInset classes or - in case of BranchInsets - on the level > of individual branch types. > > I am just thinking loudly... but maybe this solution is a bit less > hackish and a bit more flexible. Comments? Ok... if you write the code! About the 'comment' LaTeX package, this actually allows you to selectively output stuff in this way. I was thinking long about building LyX Branches on top of this, but the limitation is that it works only paragraph-by-paragraph. > Michael > Martin
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