Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
I would miss the possibility to reset a bunch of paragraphs to
default though
that is a question of ui design and is orthogonal to what i am
proposing. i think for this there should be a reset button...
This is a sensible suggestion IMHO. As we all agree that "Default" is
somewhat a different setting than the others a UI like this will have
the best of both worlds: one click for changing alignment and also one
click for resetting the alignment (which will also set the radio
button automatically to the default one).
At least one central point here has still yet to be addressed, even
though I've asked directly what people intend to do about it: There's no
such thing as "the default one" when you're dealing with a
multi-paragraph selection. That, to my mind, means there's a large hole
in the suggested implementation at this point. As currently envisaged,
the behavior in that case is dependent upon quirks in the existing code
and will be incorrect. At a minimum, a check will need to be done for a
multi-paragraph selection.
There's also the question, raised by Helge, whether having this
pushbutton is really going to be intelligible to our users. Remember:
All of this got started because the checkbox was confusing people. I
seriously doubt that the pushbutton will be more intuitive.
For what it's worth, here's another use case: It's common to want
marginal notes, mini-pages, and the like to be set raggedright due to
the small linewidth. It would be nice to be able to set this, and not
have it vanish if I start experimenting with other aspects of the
layout. And I don't think this is terribly uncommon. I often take papers
or other documents I've written with (say) article and try them out with
other layouts, just to see how they look. It'd be a major drag to find
out that doing this had undone ALL my left-aligned marginal notes.
It's true that if I'd set the marginal notes right-aligned and the new
layout didn't allow that, I'd lose that information---and if so, then we
ought to give a warning, if we don't already. In fact, I'd say we ought
to give a warning in any such case, such as the one Edwin mentioned,
where setting a previously left-aligned paragraph as a section, say,
could cause the same kind of data loss.
So yes, I think Default should somehow be distinguished from the other
possibilities, but not in such a way as to obscure what it really is:
It's the choice to let the document class determine the alignment.
That's different than choosing to align it raggedright, even if
raggedright happens to be what the current document class would do, as
the minipage example shows.
Richard
--
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Richard G Heck, Jr
Professor of Philosophy
Brown University
http://frege.brown.edu/heck/
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