Re: Possible to lose track of emphasis + shape
Darren Freeman wrote: Select some text, open Edit-Text Style-Customized, set the text Shape to Italic. Now make it Emphasized. This combination makes sense if it appears in a block of text with that Shape but not Emphasized. On the LyX screen it appears to be back to normal. This is going to trap people however. Can we add a visual cue when text is displayed upright but has non-standard styles applied? Such as a light shading behind it? Then you could select a bunch of text to make Italic, select a few words to make Emphasized, and you would see them as normal but with shading. If you now delete all the Italic you won't accidentally lose track of the state of the remaining Italic + Emphasised words. I think there's a general sense that there are serious usability issues with text styles. Sometimes I wonder if we should go away from text styles altogether in favor of character styles. There are issues there: Although (I assume) one character style can always be embedded in another, you can't have overlapping character styles. But maybe you SHOULDN'T have overlapping text styles, anyway, since that doesn't really mean anything sensible in LaTeX and it's a hack to make it work. Making this work doesn't seem real hard. The first thing we'd want is a set of default character styles to replace all the Customize... stuff. Trivial. The second is a more sensible menu structure, so that the character style menu could be nested, viz: Character StylesShapeItalic Character StylesShapeOblique Character StylesSeriesBold And so forth. The third is better handling of the labels associated with character styles. Right now, nesting them even two deep makes for something of a mess. Going three deep is a nightmare. Maybe only the outer label should be shown by default. Then, if you click into the charstyle inset, you get the next level. So, while this is obviously not 1.5.0 stuff, or even 1.5.x stuff, that's my radical solution to the problem. Richard -- == Richard G Heck, Jr Professor of Philosophy Brown University http://frege.brown.edu/heck/ == Get my public key from http://sks.keyserver.penguin.de Hash: 0x1DE91F1E66FFBDEC Learn how to sign your email using Thunderbird and GnuPG at: http://dudu.dyn.2-h.org/nist/gpg-enigmail-howto
Re: Possible to lose track of emphasis + shape
Darren Freeman wrote: Select some text, open Edit->Text Style->Customized, set the text Shape to Italic. Now make it Emphasized. This combination makes sense if it appears in a block of text with that Shape but not Emphasized. On the LyX screen it appears to be back to normal. This is going to trap people however. Can we add a visual cue when text is displayed upright but has non-standard styles applied? Such as a light shading behind it? Then you could select a bunch of text to make Italic, select a few words to make Emphasized, and you would see them as normal but with shading. If you now delete all the Italic you won't accidentally lose track of the state of the remaining Italic + Emphasised words. I think there's a general sense that there are serious usability issues with "text styles". Sometimes I wonder if we should go away from text styles altogether in favor of character styles. There are issues there: Although (I assume) one character style can always be embedded in another, you can't have overlapping character styles. But maybe you SHOULDN'T have overlapping text styles, anyway, since that doesn't really mean anything sensible in LaTeX and it's a hack to make it work. Making this work doesn't seem real hard. The first thing we'd want is a set of default character styles to replace all the Customize... stuff. Trivial. The second is a more sensible menu structure, so that the character style menu could be nested, viz: Character Styles>Shape>Italic Character Styles>Shape>Oblique Character Styles>Series>Bold And so forth. The third is better handling of the labels associated with character styles. Right now, nesting them even two deep makes for something of a mess. Going three deep is a nightmare. Maybe only the outer label should be shown by default. Then, if you click into the charstyle inset, you get the next level. So, while this is obviously not 1.5.0 stuff, or even 1.5.x stuff, that's my radical solution to the problem. Richard -- == Richard G Heck, Jr Professor of Philosophy Brown University http://frege.brown.edu/heck/ == Get my public key from http://sks.keyserver.penguin.de Hash: 0x1DE91F1E66FFBDEC Learn how to sign your email using Thunderbird and GnuPG at: http://dudu.dyn.2-h.org/nist/gpg-enigmail-howto