On Sat, Feb 06, 1999 at 08:35:27AM -0400, Garst R. Reese wrote:
> Amir Karger wrote:
> >
> > That said, I think perhaps the parenthetical style would work better if you
> > got away from WYSIWYG. I supposed you chose the normalsize typewriter one
> > parenthesis so that it would look like the beginning of a parentheses. Which
> > is a good idea, but I think that way too many newbies won't do the right
> > thing. And while we LyXers admit that you can't (and shouldn't) create a
> > program that works without people reading *any* docs, it's always nicer to
> > make things intuitive. There's a few things you could do here.
> >
> > (1) Write '()' instead of '('. That's a visual cue that this is a
> > parenthetical statement, but it won't freak people out thinking there's an
> > unmatched parenthesis.
>
> The problem here is that latex cannot show the ending ')' to LyX, but
> does put it into the printed output. My options were to make the user
> put in both or none.
> I changed to '(' to magenta.
I don't really understand this sentence. And perhaps I don't understand how
the layout gets transformed into a latex environment. I was imagining that
you could do something like the Comment layout, where the word "Comment:"
comes before the paragraph but is not put in the actual LaTeX when you
export or print it.
>
> > (2) Use Bold and/or a different color for the (). That makes it totally
> > obvious that it's not regular text. See various slides layouts
> > or the Comment layout for an example.
>
> The color change works, but I don't want to change anything that would
> affect the printed scpript.
>
> > (3) Write "Parenthetical:" instead of '(' or '()'. Obviously this would work
> > best in combination with #2 above
> That would get prnted.
As I said above. I'm pretty sure it will *not* get printed if you do it
right. For example, I edited hollywood.layout so that the LabelString for
Parenthetical was "(ajskdlfas". In LyX, that string came before every
parenthetical par, but only the normal beginning & end parens were in the
dvi output. Jean-Marc can correct me if I'm wrong here.
So, using LabelFont or by changing the labelstring, you could modify what's
written in LyX at the start of the paragraph without changing the printout.
In fact, you could even use TextFont to make the text italics (for example).
It *still* gets printed out normally. Again, while you certainly want the
printout to look exactly like it would with a typewriter (a what?), you
could make the LyX view have some more visual cues to set parenthetical text
aside from regular text (with more than just the indenting). Since the
labelstring (e.g. "()") only gets printed out at the beginning of the first
of a group of Parenthetical lines (e.g. if you wordwrap), italics would be
more clear than just the () label. OTOH, perhaps you want to keep the LyX
view looking very much like the output. (That seems to be against the
WYSIWYM ideal, but perhaps you disagree.)
> > (4) change the color/font/whatever of the actual *text* of a parenthetical
> > (as opposed to the LabelString). You could, for example, make it *smaller*
> > to show that it's a parenthetical. But that might hurt people's eyes, and
> > they might think it's going to be printed smaller. (Hm. The second objection
> > may be silly.) A less controversial idea woudl be to change the color of a
> > parenthetical. Again, a visual cue that something's going on, but the
> > average user won't be concerned that it will print out in that color. Um,
> > probably.
> Actually, I think changing the color of both might be best. Votes?
Yup. Changing the color of only the label isn't nearly as obvious. And font
changes on the characters () aren't very obvious, while "Parenthetical" is
too long a label, and "paren" isn't so obvious.
> Thanks, especially for the suggestions.
The danger in thanking me for suggestions is that I"ll keep suggesting.
-Amir
