Richard Heck wrote Tuesday, November 23, 2010,
20:56:06:
RH> On 11/23/2010 03:48 AM, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
>> Richard Heck wrote:
>>>> I see that the file is for unicode symbols only.
>>>> So this cannot be used for something which is
>>>> outside unicode table, can it?
>>> There are such things?

Certainly there are such things. "The
Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List" contains many
symbols which do not belong to unicode.
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/comprehensive.html

My personal need concerns the commands of the
Russian babel. In Russian babel there are, for
example, 3 commands for "Cyrillic" dashes:
\cdash- in plain text.
\cdash~ in compound names
\cdash* for denoting direct speech.
One can enter them with ERT as "---, "--~ and
"--*, but it is very time-consuming and can not be
done using hot keys (as far as I understand).

>> Sure. Alexander's proposal is very valid. And actually despetrately needed.
>> Currently, we cannot even make insets like for \theendnotes in our modules,
>> but we have to advice the module users to use ERT.
>>
>> What we need, is an InsetFlex without an InsetText (the FlexInset counterpart
>> to InsetCommand).
RH> Oh, if that's what's needed, it's bug #4066.
RH> The whole InsetParamsWidget thing is a big
RH> step in that direction, I think. I'm hoping to
RH> do this for 2.1. But I thought he was talking
RH> about particular characters, not commands.

Sorry for my vague description of the problem and
somewhat confusing title for the thread. Logically
any special character is very similar to an inset
without text inside. At an abstract level one can
think about text markup entities which are
elementary in their nature and do not contain
anything within them. There are such things in
LyX, but all of them are hard coded (like ellipsis
or hyphenation point). The only exception and a
great progress are macros in math. It would be
great to have something like that for the text.
Besides special characters proper such
functionality can be used for ornaments, logos
(like \LaTeX) other solitary LaTeX commands like
\theendnotes, etc.

The ability of customizing these things would
allow to create various useful modules, for
example, support for Russian babel, support for
unique dingbat/ornament fonts, etc.

    Alexander


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