On Monday 28 October 2002 12:16 pm, John Levon wrote: > On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 04:42:18PM +0000, José Luis Gómez Dans wrote: > > > won't hurt. And, as you all are probably tired of hearing me say, BY > > > FAR the worst LyX deficiency is the lack of character styles, and > > > that should be top priority in 1.4. There's only so long the color > > > > Sorry, but could you enlighten me to what character styles are? > > A decent character style system allows you to create semantic names and > associate those with visual mark-up, on a character level. > > So you can define a "Employee" style, and set the style to always be > italic or whatever. > > It is without a doubt the number one missing functionality from LyX. > > regards > john
Exactly! My book, "Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist" discusses the 10 step Universal Troubleshooting Process. Each step is a short phrase. It was absolutely vital that any references to these steps have their own appearance. I wanted the ability to highlight the phrase, click a drop box similar to the current Environment drop box, and pick out the UTP_step character style, thereby formatting the style. But LyX lacks that ability. One might suggest I simply fine tune every occurrence of a UTP step in my book. But look at the disadvantages: * It's an affront to the WYSIWYM philosophy. * Mistake prone: One would need to remember the exact formatting of steps throughout the book. * If one ever wanted to change the appearance of the steps, it would require hunting them all down. Even a VI search and replace wouldn't work because those same font attributes could be applied to other pieces of text. Four chapters into the book I discovered the lack of character styles, and almost dumped LyX. Fortunately, Dekel Tsur showed me how to apply colors to character styles to accomplish what I wanted. The result is an outstanding book. But even so, the limited number of colors forced me to format source code scraps (source code phrases inside an otherwise normal paragraph) as a monospaced font, rather than as a character style. So if it's ever necessary to format these source code snippets differently, it would require several days of painstaking and mistake prone work. WordPerfect had character styles since their 1988 Version 5.0. When I started working with MS Word in 1994, it had character styles. StarOffice and OpenOffice have them. As a matter of fact, if you want to understand character styles, OpenOffice is an excellent way to learn about them. In every way OTHER than character styles, LyX beats the daylights out of WordPerfect, Word, StarOffice, OpenOffice, and all the others when it comes to writing long documents. IMHO LyX should be fitted with character styles as soon as possible. Steve -- _____________________________________________________________ Steve Litt Author: * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com Troubleshooters.Com Webmaster (Legal Disclaimer) Follow these suggestions at your own risk. -------------------------------------------------------------
