On Thursday 04 December 2003 15:17, Michael Schmitt wrote: > Dear Martin et al., > > do you need some more comments? Ok, here are mine :-)
Good to hear. > > Yes, box removing by <Backspace> is 'direct manipulation' according to > > this definition. > > > > Nobody, not a single person! complained about this since 1.3.0 is out. > > I am really tempted to call this argument 'FUD'. > > Personally, I have no problem with this feature. Although I consider > myself a power-user, I have never noticed it in mathed. This also means > that it has never been an obstacle when writing some formula :-) > > HOWEVER... and now I will make you very angry ... I don't like the > CharStyle inset approach at all - at least in the way it is planned at > the moment. You don't make us angry just be disagreeing with us. :-) > Insets are an appropriate means for structured editing but they are not > suitable for writing consecutive text. If I had had to insert an inset > for every emphasized term, for every capitalized product name, for every > keyword in typewriter font, and for every figure reference in sans serif > in my PhD, I would have jumped out of the window!!! The LyX motto "WYSIWM" it is not really implemented at moment. And one of the reasons is because we lake the logical char styles. In several aspects we still encourage the user to think about italics, capitalized, typewriter and sans serif. Notice that you used those words instead of their concepts above. What if suddenly you want to change that to a new style, what do you do? I know that we should have some kind of compromise, but you seem to be pushing it to WYSIWYG. > But instead of starting a discussion on how to display insets in the > most comfortable way, we have to clarify the general concepts of > character styles first. The point again is that the insets are an implementation detail. And courageous step, IMHO, in the right direction. Also you will not be forced to use them, they are really usefull at this moment for linuxdoc, docbook and AGU. Yes, they are usefull also to latex, but for the other fontends they are a must have. We have been discussing this for the last 4 years (at least). And Martin showed a simple self-contained approach, the amount of code needed is minimal, and non-intrusive. > IMHO there should be no fixed set of char styles. > Instead the user should be able to define his own styles and > change them later (similar to branches). This, of course, requires > additional dialogs, etc. etc. That was of the goals stated by Martin since the first hour. And we need to start somewhere... > So... do we really want such a mammoth project while LyX is broken at > each corner? Last night, I worked four hours on a simple > insetcollapsable/insertert code merge just to find out that the crashes > I experienced also occur with the latest cvs :-( (The fact that my 1Ghz > 128MB computer spent more than half of the time on compiling and > swapping did not improve my bad mood). That is always the question of the 90%-10%. They also very useful as they are an can be improved for sure. > Shouldn't we concentrate on bug fixing rather than starting new projects? I think that Martin, André or me have been fixing our share of bugs. (Is there such a thing? ;-) ). > Michael PS: Everything said should be taken with a grain of salt, or sugar, or chocolate or every if you prefer. ;-) -- José Abílio LyX and docbook, a perfect match. :-)
