Guenter Milde wrote: > The current GUI design is inconsistent if you want to export to the most > commen document types: > > 1. DVI TeX fonts for the TeX nostalgic > > 2. PS TeX fonts for fast preview/printing and PS-tricks > > 3. PDF (pdflatex) TeX fonts for traditional PDF > > 4. PDF (XeTeX) OpenType fonts for the traditional Unicode user > > 5. PDF (LuaTeX) OpenType fonts for the adventurous Unicode user > > 6. LyXHTML OpenType fonts for online use > > You can select between 1, 2, 3, and 6 from the "see other formats" > toobar buttons or menu entry, without need to change the source document.
Not in practice. 6. does not work for many documents (because of ERT) and requires many more changes than just toggling a single button. [snip lots of reasons why an automatic font settings is useful] It seems we misunderstand each other. You do not need to convince me that the automatic selection is useful. I know that (and the most important reason for me personally is that you can set an explicit default format per document: an automatic choice of non-TeX would eliminate uncompilable documents if such a default format is set). What I want is a solution for the "double automatic" problem: What is the default output format if it is set to automatic in the document, and non-TeX fonts are set to automatic as well? None of the discussed solutions was convincing so far for me: 1) Use latex as engine for the default output format and automatic fonts as in my initial patch. This is an arbitrary choice and intransparent for the user. 2) Have only one Default Output Format under Tools>Preferences>File>Handling instead of two. Then the default output format of a document with automatic TeX/non-TeX fonts would be the one defined in preferences. Depending on the document contents the default output format may not work at all. 3) Like 2), but with a hard coded substitution list for the cases that the selected format does not work. This would be heavily intransparent for the user: You would need to know a lot of the internals to understand why the default output format would use pdflatex, although you set non-TeX fonts to automatic, and chose XeTeX as default output format in the preferences. 4) Like 3), but with a user configurable substitution list. This would not be intransparent anymore, but still quite difficult to understand. 5) Remove the default output format completely and recommend to use automatic non-TeX fonts. This would be quite radical, and I am not sure it would cover all use cases. One would need to think more about it. > The automatic font package selection (fontenc vs. fontspec) would be > similar to the automatic language package selection (babel vs. > polyglossia). Almost: No other automatic setting is undefined if the language package is set to automatic. > However, the most problematic part (for me) is, that the obscure > combinations XeTeX/LuaTeX & TeX fonts are simpler to reach than the much > more usefull LuaTeX & OpenType fonts. Yes, this is not nice, but the drawbacks of the solutions for the "double automatic" above play in a similar category IMHO. Georg
