Stefano Baroni wrote:
Why don't the default key bindings on mac osx follow the standard mac convention? (e.g. italicising could be <opt>-i, rather than <opt>-e). Not that it is that important, but it would be much nicer ... Thanks - SB
One answer to that is that this really isn't italics, it's "emphasis". If you emphasize a word in a line that is normally set in italics, such as the statement of a theorem in mathematics, then the emphasized word comes out upright. LyX (and TeX) hang on to the idea of emphasizing the word, so you can take the paragraph containing it, change the environment that text is in, and get correct behavior. If, on the other hand, you set it as forced-italicized and changed the whole paragraph to an italicized mode, it would stay italicized. This is the difference between the two ERT commands {\it{}} and \emph{}. As I recall, Lyx used to support both environments, but a decision was made to only use \emph{}.
Of course, it may be that Mac's do this with <opt>-i for other programs. -- David L. Johnson As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein
