Darren Freeman wrote:
Select some text, open Edit->Text Style->Customized, set the text Shape
to Italic. Now make it Emphasized. This combination makes sense if it
appears in a block of text with that Shape but not Emphasized.
On the LyX screen it appears to be back to normal. This is going to trap
people however. Can we add a visual cue when text is displayed upright
but has non-standard styles applied? Such as a light shading behind it?
Then you could select a bunch of text to make Italic, select a few words
to make Emphasized, and you would see them as normal but with shading.
If you now delete all the Italic you won't accidentally lose track of
the state of the remaining Italic + Emphasised words.
I think there's a general sense that there are serious usability issues
with "text styles". Sometimes I wonder if we should go away from text
styles altogether in favor of character styles. There are issues there:
Although (I assume) one character style can always be embedded in
another, you can't have overlapping character styles. But maybe you
SHOULDN'T have overlapping text styles, anyway, since that doesn't
really mean anything sensible in LaTeX and it's a hack to make it work.
Making this work doesn't seem real hard. The first thing we'd want is a
set of default character styles to replace all the Customize... stuff.
Trivial. The second is a more sensible menu structure, so that the
character style menu could be nested, viz:
Character Styles>Shape>Italic
Character Styles>Shape>Oblique
Character Styles>Series>Bold
And so forth. The third is better handling of the labels associated with
character styles. Right now, nesting them even two deep makes for
something of a mess. Going three deep is a nightmare. Maybe only the
outer label should be shown by default. Then, if you click into the
charstyle inset, you get the next level.
So, while this is obviously not 1.5.0 stuff, or even 1.5.x stuff, that's
my radical solution to the problem.
Richard
--
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Richard G Heck, Jr
Professor of Philosophy
Brown University
http://frege.brown.edu/heck/
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