Hi Manolo,
On 4/20/2012 9:34 AM, Manolo Martínez wrote:
> This has probably been discussed before, although I don't quite recall the
> suggestion I'm about to make.
>
> As most LyXers, I use a short space (C-Space) as a substitute for spaces in
> the
> title of descriptions in LyX. As many, I take this to be not the most
> beautiful
> of hacks.
>
> I was wondering if the following would not be a better solution: telling LyX,
> MarkDown-style, that whatever goes into the first, outermost pair of brackets
> in a definition is its title. One would write:
>
> (Title) This is blah.
>
> If one needs brackets in the title, she should write:
>
> ((Title in Brackets)) Blah.
>
> This would provide cleaner .tex files. If a description does not start with a
> bracketed title, LyX would complain.
I largely agree with your point that the way we handle spaces in the
list and description environments is suboptimal (control-space isn't the
most intuitive way of adding a space to a description title, to my own
embarrassment I only learned about it recently). With that said ... (my
apologies up front, this email comes dangerously close to rant)
I much prefer it to needing to make use of markup or markdown in an
environment that is otherwise WYSIWYG. By much prefer, I mean to say, I
think it would be a horrible thing if we suddenly start requiring users
to make use of syntax in a visual environment.
I am very sympathetic to the need for clean output. (I've ranted about
some of the choices made in XHTML export, for example.) But, to me,
that's secondary to the cleanliness of the writing experience. If LyX is
complaining because I'm not including parentheses or brackets, that is
not a step forward. We don't use them anywhere else inside of LyX, and I
don't think we should. If I wanted to write with markup (any markup), I
would write with markup directly. That would give me the exact
representation of my thoughts that I want. I use LyX so that I don't
have to do that and can still have a high level of control over the output.
It also seems as though there is a solution to this issue that doesn't
require the use of markup inside LyX itself: add a TeX inset to the
title. Once added, I can type a title without needing to control-space
and it produces very clean TeX output. E.g.:
\begin{description}
\item [{Item Title}] This is the first item.
...
\end{description}
There are also several other places where I am *very* particular about
my markup. In all of these places, you can use the TeX inset to produce
exactly what you want to appear in the output.
It's still a workaround, but I think it's much cleaner than requiring
markup/markdown/chickenscratch inside of LyX (even if the option is
complete optional controlled by a deeply buried preference somewhere).
Cheers,
Rob
