On Thursday 08 August 2002 20:46, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thursday 08 August 2002 12:50 pm, Thomas Templin wrote:
> > On Thursday 08 August 2002 17:35, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > On Thursday 08 August 2002 06:18 am, Guenter Milde wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 09:11:26 -0400 wrote Steve Litt
> > >
> > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > > > > Yes. My original question was whether character styles
> > > > > could be incorporated into LyX as a normal feature, the
> > > > > same way it's incorporated in WordPerfect, MS Word and
> > > > > OpenOffice. Including character styles as an integrated
> > > > > feature would greatly boost the credibility of the "what
> > > > > you see is what you mean" philosophy.
> > > >
> > > > Or to say it less LyX specific it is a question of generic
> > > > vs. visual markup. (And of course LyX should support the
> > > > first as far as possible!) Wouldn't be an extension of the
> > > > math-macro feature to non-math macros be a help? And if we
> > > > than had a "preamble-like" place where the macro
> > > > definitions could go without being in the way when I look
> > > > at the actual document, I'd be quite happy -- once again
> > > > this calls for the "enhanced preamble editing"...
> > > >
> > > > Guenter
> > >
> > > Hi Guenter,
> > >
> > > I don't understand what you've written above, so let me
> > > describe how I envision LyX character styles.
> > >
> > > I envision it as a drop down box very similar to the
> > > environment drop down box. Highlight the text, select the
> > > character style, and the text is formatted (in LyX)
> > > similarly to the intended .ps format, and exactly as desired
> > > in the final .ps output. Character styles would be created
> > > similar to environments -- in a .layout file or a style
> > > file, and then incorporated using edit->reconfigure.
> > >
> > > If it's easier, perhaps the character styles could be
> > > intermixed with the paragraph styles (environments) in the
> > > environment dropdown. In such a case some sort of identifier
> > > would differentiate the environments from the character
> > > styles.
> >
> > Couldnt this be done by some kind of "special" latex include
> > file? For my own documents i am using a file with a lot of
> > \newcommand's like
> > \newcommand{\company} [1] {\textbf{#1}}
> > and then
> > \newcommand{\redhat} {\company{RedHat}\xspace}
> > so what I get are two things. First a Character style \company
> > and an acronym \redhat, a better example should be DNA for
> > Desoxyribonucleinacid :).
> > This could be placed somwhere in the ~/.lyx path or the user
> > LaTeX path and then nested to a character pulldown menu and a
> > shorttag pulldown menu in LyX.
> > The only problem is that this tags will not be used for a html
> > output with pdflatex (up to now).
> >
> > May be a standalone preamble file could be an other way to get
> > this behaviour. Then the files could be packed into a tgz file
> > including the original lyx file and the preamble file. Another
> > benefit would be to use a user customizable editor for the
> > preamble. To my opinion the pramble window is at least a
> > painfull thing. :) (German: Ich finde, dass Arbeiten mit dem
> > Pr�ambel Fenster ist zumindestens als schmerzhaft zu
> > bezeichnen.)
[...]
>
> Using your standalone preamble idea, how do you envision the
> process of actually tagging text as the character style in such
> a way that it's fast and brainless for the author, who
> doubtlessly has 90% of his brain working on what he's writing?
[...]
Thats even a problem for me. After a while, up to now round about
two years, this file has grown up to 48Kbytes. So its a good idea
to write a documentation even for the author of such a file.:)
For those who use this kind of "hack" every day it shold be no
problem to keep in mind writing ERT \DNS for
Desoxyribomucleinsaeure or \company{Ikea} for Ikea Company.
A better way would be a script which is looking for words from a
list which should appear in a special character style and change
the lyx file itself. But I think this might be a way which is much
harder to implement into a LyX gui than using a standalone "style
file". The author of a document would not see this character style
settings in LyX so it is a problem of user acceptance too.
But this might be a way for setting character styles in other
filetypes than lyx files eg. dockboook-xml or whatever.
An other idea might be a kind of "soft ERT" mode. So ERT could be
used for more complex things and a soft ERT mode for character
styles. This soft ERT mode could be user controlled from a config
menue like the preferences - screen font menu. May be like the
filter creation menu of KMail which allows simple adding of new
filter strings.
bye,
Thomas
