Paul A. Rubin ha scritto:
Short of a context-sensitive menu entry that tells you what specific
optional arguments are available for the current environment, I'm not
sure there's a better way to guide that naive user.
Ok, "optional argument" seems too LaTeX-concept, in that the user would
be supposed to
know what is an argument, and what I'm giving that argument to. On the
other hand,
"short title" seems ok for titles in the toc, and might also be
appropriate for theorems,
once you realize that the word "title" does not necessarily refer to
section titles.
First, a further proposal: *alternate title*, infact, for theorems, it
is probably a longer
title, not a shorter one :-).
Now the question is: what use do other environments do of this optional
argument ?
Is that always an alternate text to be used when producing dvi/ps/pdf ?
If it is not, then a context-sensitive menu would be a great thing, with
a text that
appears differently depending on what is written on the layout file as
the name of
that option. Anyway, it's a matter of introducing context-sensitive
menus in LyX, what
is currently completely missing and would instead greatly improve usability.
... I'm having a suspect ... are most of the LyX main developers Mac
users ?!? :-)
That said, I'd like to highlight that I can't see a utility for the user
having the
flexibility to place the optional argument (inset) wherever he/she
wants, in the
text, or in having the ability to cut and paste the entire inset (the
containted
text would be useful, but I was wondering about the meaning of copying an
optional arg). I checked you cannot insert it twice in the same
paragraph, but,
for example, you *can* insert one inset for each paragraph, within the same
multi-paragraph layout. A quick look at the source through "View Source"
shows
that the second inset seems to be ignored. Ok, guess this may be seen as
a bug.
Probably, as a user, I run the risk to "loose" the optional arg, or, if
I didn't write
the section in the first place, then I would have to search for it in
the text. On the
other hand, I would be glad to find such an optional argument in something
like a "paragraph settings" or "layout settings" dialog. Such dialog
could be
popped up, for example, with a right-click, respecting the current LyX
convention
(cfr. tables).
Last, consider to never change something that (basically) works :-)
T.
