The "paragraph settings" dialog blanks out the "longest label" field
when the selection spans more than one paragraph. Even if they're all in
the same list, or several lists that has the same "longest label" setting.
This is confusing and leads to loss of the longest label setting,
because pressing OK then sets the empty string as the new longest label.
Information can be lost be merely making a selection, bringing up the
dialog and pressing OK without changing anything at all. "No change" in
a dialog really ought the be no change.
I can work around this because I have figured out this behaviour, not
all users are able to do that. Instead, they may feel that LyX randomly
wrecks formatting. (like some other word processors do...)
A use case for this is a page with several short lists, with some
text/headings in between. Select the lot and set a common longest label
for the whole page. Click apply and see that it looks nice. (But the
field blanks out immediately after "apply".) Click OK to get rid of the
dialog, and loose the formatting!
Expected behaviour: If all lists in the selection have the same "longest
label", then show that in the dialog. (Having some headings or
paragraphs that don't have a "longest label" setting in the selection
should not prevent the longest label from displaying properly either.
If there are several lists with different labels in the selection,
indicate this. Perhaps by displaying "<varies>" in the longest label
field. If the user then change something else (line spacing or
alignment) and clicks OK, then don't reset the "longest label" because
the user has not changed this field. It should be possible to change the
line spacing of several lists without forcing a common longest label.
Helge Hafting
