On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 11:20:15AM -0600, Bo Peng wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I upgraded lyx 1.2 to lyx 1.3.1 for our department yesterday and I already
> got angry emails claiming lyx 1.3 is worse than 1.2, because users get
> compile errors when they input symbols inside text mode (as they did in
> lyx1.2).
In mathed's text mode you mean?
> Can lyx, for example, give a warning for entering symbols inside text
> mode? The warning message does not have to be fired for every possible
> wrong input, just to Greek letters and common symbols. I can not fully
> justify my wish that 'everything user can input (except for plain tex)
> should not lead to compile error' but warning messages for obvious
> cases are something we can do to make lyx more user friendly.
The \alpha in textmode is black, isn't it? The simplest way would to tell
people 'real alphas are blue'.
Well.
How should the warning message look like? I don't think a full blown
message box is in order, so best I could offer is a patch to write that
message into the status line which will get overwritten soon. The black
color is permanent though...
Another option would be to use
\let\oldalpha\alpha \def\alpha{\ensuremath{\oldalpha}}
in the preamble (or some 'global' style file) which allows you to use
\alpha in text and math.
I am still a bit reluctant to hard code this check, not only because any
such check will fail in some situations but also because I won't go
through all 700 supported symbols and figure out which ones are safe to
use in text and which ones are not.
Andre'
