Dieter Jurzitza wrote:
Hi folks,
first of all: thank you for all your replies. And yes, after hearing what you
came up with I think ERT should remain ERT and inserting an automatic blank
_within_ the ERT is not a good idea.
But wait: what is LyX saying about itself, WYSIWYM? Hey, if I put a whitespace
after the end of an ERT you tell me we see it but we won't protect it because
you put it there but because you've been working with an ERT before we are
sure you did not mean to see a whitespace there ...
sorry. This is nothing related to "other text processing systems". This is
related to "I would expect to see what I mean".
I understand what you mean, but "what you see is what you mean" can also
be understood as "this ERT stuff doing funny things to the text that
follows it is what I mean..."
There are various latex constructs that do things to the _next_
character - or even removes it. The next character might be the space
following the ERT box.
When an ERT box end in a latex command, I add {} to avoid surprises.
This is easy enough to do, and {} won't usually hurt when it isn't
necessary. Still, it can't be done automatically, in case you have
something odd in that ERT.
I don't think this can be solved, but if it could, I'd rather spend
the effort on supporting more packages so that ERT won't be necessary.
LyX without ERT should be easy to use and understand.
There is one very basic question I am rising here for discussion: is the
target beauty or understandability? I think all of you spend hours and hours
(I _really_ appreciate, don't get me wrong) in making LyX to what it is:
highly usuable, extremely configurable and with a very nice user interface.
However, I think all we are TeXnicians to some extent, aren't we? And that's
the measure LyX will be checked against: the "native" user not being that
familiar with TeX.
According to my understanding he should be protected against the oddities of
TeX by the help of LyX. Well, I hear you say, the native user will not use
TeX inserts - maybe - but he might do so. And that's were my point starts. I
would say that if someone puts whitespace after an ERT, why would he do this?
I'd say he does this because he want's it to be there.
Usually, yes. Your case is the normal one. But there are other cases,
and auto-adding anything will make the unusual cases impossible. And the
whole point of ERT is to support unusual stuff. Anything normal ought to
be supported without ERT - someday.
Helge Hafting
