On 2020-08-17 10:10, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
Le 17 août 2020 09:28:11 GMT+02:00, Daniel <xraco...@gmx.de> a écrit :
The answer to "Do we want the feature at all? If not, how could it be
changed to be good for everyone?" seems to be:
First question: Some seem to want it, one seems to be indifferent only
if there is a GUI switch, others are indifferent.
I have personally been busy with other stuff and did not answer as I should
have.
My main issue is that this pushes people away from the semantics of layouts and
towards wysiwygness. We definitely do not want people to pick a particular
layout because it looks like what they want. On the contrary, they should pick
the one that does what they want, and then try to change it (different class,
other tweaks) if the look is not acceptable.
Yes, I thought about the WYSIWYGness of formatted style choosers. My
thinking ended up being this:
LyX uses formatting to give the user a better overview of a document
(this is what I take to be according to WYSIWYM though I am using this
term without having a definition). So, LyX helps the user in this way to
get a better overview. And my thought was that having formatting in the
layout combobox will fulfill some of the same purposes and that this is
as much WYSIWYGness as in the work area (probably none).
And I would expect a user coming from a WYSIWYG word processors to care
much more about the result in the workarea than in the combobox. So the
possible detrimental effect seems small.
In general, I guess that choosing a layout by its visuals in the
combobox has (at least) two sides: one is the risk that you might choose
what looks most like what you want (this applies to the work area as
well and more so, I would say). The other is that you choose using your
visual memory of what you have chosen before, which in turn might help
you choose quicker among the layouts without having to read.
I see how the new look may seem nice, but could you give me an example of how
it helps to pick the right layout?
Some particular examples:
- The LyX-Code and verbatim layouts have a typewriter font to
distinguish it from the other main layouts. This distinction becomes
visible in the layout combobox too.
- The greater sizes or boldness of the sectioning layouts make the user
distinguish them more quickly and find sections in the main text. This
helps the user distinguish them and find the relevant section quickly in
the combobox too.
But I find it a bit hard to evaluate all these claims without having
them tested more widely in practice.
--
Daniel
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