Hi Juergen,
Thanks for the screenshot; I agree that this is clearly not optimal.
I personally have not used character styles so far, but it looks like
finding a good solution is hard.
The "underbrace" solution is very nice in principle (and useful for
character styles that may not be easily recognizable), but of course it
does not lend itself to breaking up one box into three boxes.
Maybe something like underlining a style in a different color, and
showing a "pointer" to that style, could work for partial lines:
blah _emphasized..._
_still emphasized_ \
_ending here_ blah \ emph
Again, apologies for the poor ASCII art. The idea would be that a
"legend" points to the colored underline, explaining what it means.
This idea has the weakness that it requires a margin in the editor,
wasting space that is normally used for text.
Maybe just using the static bar for information (when the cursor is on
the styled text) and a colored (dashed?) underline to indicate the
presence of a character style, is best?
Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
Cyrille Artho wrote:
I now understand better what you meant. If we get accepted for this
year's GSoC, I hope you have time to make a screenshot (or at least we
can mark up the ASCII art with the right tags so the browser will not
screw it up. My e-mail reader did.)
Note that I just recorded this long-time request. I feel not responsible for
this particular task (and cannot mentor it).
I personally think that LyX handles ERT (TeX) insets and footnotes
pretty well. Short ERT is just like a long word in text, and I
personally don't mind long insets starting on a new line as I would
write corresponding LaTeX code in the same style.
But there are probably cases where the user experience can be improved.
I think this is in fact one of the biggest usability flaws in LyX, not just
"some cosmetic problem", but a pretty serious UI design problem of LyX.
For a long time, we wanted to add character styles, but this is simply not
user-friendly enough as long as insets do not fit into the flow of the main
text. Have a look at the attached screenshot. It uses the "logical markup"
module which is the first attempt to provide proper character styles. Since
character styles are one of the main features of LaTeX, the unability to
properly represent them (at least when we want to use insets) is a siginifcant
problem.
Regards,
Jürgen
--
Regards,
Cyrille Artho - http://artho.com/
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot,
are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
-- George Gordon Noel Byron
