On Thursday 10 September 2009 04:14:44 Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
> Steve Litt wrote:
> > This time, when inserting see and seealso records, I'm forced to use ERT
> > for each of the curly braces or else part of the seealso text doesn't
> > show up and an erroneous page number is shown. This is a huge time sink.
>
> The big change in 1.6.x indexing is that indexes now behave as normal text.
> So you have to use ERT whereever you would need ERT in normal text. Since
> |see{} is a LaTeX macro (just using "|" instead of "\"), ERT is not bogus
> at all here.
Let me refine the concept of "bogus". True, the ERT isn't bogus from a data
consistency point of view, nor is it bogus from a logical point of view. But
it's very bogus from the point of view of the user's workflow. The user must
now, twice per index see or seealso entry, press Ctrl+L and type in a curly
brace. If the user doesn't use T1 output character set, he has to do something
similar with every regular index entry with a range. This significantly slows
the user, makes the user think about something other than the content, and can
cause temporary failure to an unsophisticated user.
The point of computer programming is to make things faster and easier for the
user. Otherwise, why not just use TeX? This change makes things slower and
harder while indexing.
>
> The gain of this change is that you are not forced to write \"ubergro\ss
> but can simply write übergroß in all encodings. And you can directly
> emphasize entries, without the need to write \emph{my entry}.
That's definitely a gain. The trouble is, it comes at the cost of a loss for
ranges and sees and seealsos. It also breaks formerly working documents. I'm
sure there are ways to implement the advantages without the disadvantages.
Here are a few:
* Use a dialog box to define each element of an index entry.
* Have a single character to escape |, { and }
* Have an option to evaluate indexes the way 1.5.x did
If nothing is done about this, it won't harm me. I write only English so T1 is
fine with me. I find it better to put see and seealso entries in a separate
file
so I won't have to ERT twice per entry. Even if things change some more so T1
doesn't work for me, I already have a kludge script to correct the LyX
produced LaTeX. But these opportunities aren't available to a lot of users,
and they will be slowed by this new method of parsing LyX index entries.
StevET
Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
