On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
Bo Peng wrote:
There is a way to introduce a bold button cleanly. But it includes
removing emph and noun and replacing it with textit and textsc.
I do not see why textit, em and charstyle Emph can not co-exist, and I
have no objection to use em instead of textit after textbf.
Because these are fundamentally different concepts (I keep repeating
myself). You have referred to word processors such as msword or Ooo.
Even those do separate the two concepts (here, I have to correct
myself): They have only buttons for physical markup in the toolbars,
namely bold, underline, italics (and sometimes small caps). We have
*none* of those buttons in our toolbar, so if we are going to go that
way, we have to go it to the end.
My thoughts, solely as a user of LyX who really appreciated it while
writing: I've read this thread, and I'm amazed about confusion that I
consider part of the core values of LyX.
LyX is not a word processor or a desktop publishing program. It's not
WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM. We encourage users to _not_ finger paint their
document. We encourage users to _emphasize_ parts rather than manually
making it italic or bold. The whole point is that the appearance of
semantic markup is controlled separately.
Given the above, buttons for 'emphasized', 'strong' and 'noun' are what we
want. The button for 'bold' is an inconsistency, a hack, and I think it
should go away.
When I've demonstrated LyX for other users, expanding on the advantages of
separating style from content, they often look at the bold button and are
just confused. It should go.
I'm not saying we should make it impossible for users to force certain
parts of the text to be bold, or italic, or other kinds of font issues.
However, we should not encourage them - physical markup should be kept
away.
If users complain about this, let's investigate what their need really is.
What kind of _texts_ need part of it to be 'bold', instead of something
with a meaning? Is the problem a missing LaTeX class/style? Is the
problem that it's difficult to define your own semantic styles?
(I never used bold with the exception of \mathbf etc, where I used it for
vectors and dyads. However, if I'd been thrilled to able to mark them
semantically!)
If we gonna introduce the physical markup, then separate. Not under
Edit->Text Style (because these are not character styles), but under a
separate item (Edit->Font Shape, for instance). However, I think the
character dialog is the right place.
I agree.
The same applies for the menus. We can introduce bold to the menus, but
not together with noun and emph, but with textsc and textit.
For toolbars, the boldface button can be \textbf for 1.5.x, and
\strong for 1.6.x.
I disagree (see above).
I also do not think we should have menu items for bold etc.
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
