Hi all, First of all, thank you for adding Character Styles in LyX 1.4.x in 2006. As far as I'm concerned, character styles was the last thing LyX needed to be complete.
Now I'd like to ask another favor: a quicker way to apply character styles. As it stands now, * Highlight * rightclick * Select Text Style to pop up the text style menu * Select your character style off that popup. You can also do it with Edit->Text_Style, but that's no easier. Besides being long and drawn out, unless you handle your mouse cursor *just right*, the Text Styles submenu closes and you need to re-highlight "Text Menu" and try again. You can make it a little more foolproof by actually *clicking* "Text Menu", but it's still way too many steps for something you often have to do twice per sentence for twenty sentences in a row. You can also do it with the keyboard: * Highlight * Alt+E then S * Keep hitting Tab until it highlights the right character style. This is actually much better, but it's still enough fidgeting to make you forget what you were writing. There's no alternative facilitating going backward if you tab too far, at least without taking your hands off home position. And tabbing around another time is complicated by the fact that true character styles are intermingled with Capitalize, Uppercase, Lowercase, and "Customized", which is really just a form of non-ERT fingerpainting and shouldn't be done in a styles-based (or WYSIWYM, if you prefer) document. At a minimum, character styles would sure be easier if completely unrelated functions Capitalize, Uppercase, Lowercase, and Customized were removed from that menu. Personally, I'd like to get "Dissolve Text Style" off that menu for a million different reasons, including risk of accidental dissolution, easier to apply text styles, and the fact that the few time one actually needs to dissolve a text style, one can mouse inside and cut, use the backspace key to delete the inset, then paste. That's a horribly inefficient process, but I can't imagine anyone dissolving text styles often, so it doesn't cost much. In contrast, I often need to do five character style applications per paragraph. I'm not being a prima donna here. I've been using this interface since 2006, trying to get used to it. But it's not getting any easier, and in fact it slows me down enough that I lose my train of thought, and that's one of the worst thing an authoring tool can do to its user. You know what I'd like to see? For starters, put Customize, Capitalize, Uppercase, Lowercase, and Dissolve somewhere else, leaving only true character styles on the Alt+E,S menu. Second, code the Alt+E,S menu so typing a letter would move the highlight to the next character style beginning with that letter. That would start to make applying character styles a reflex that doesn't interfere with thought about content. For extra credit, have a single hotkey bring up the floating menu of character styles. Believe me, if you use character styles in the same way they're used in books of the Unleashed series, the For Dummies series, O'Reilly books, or even a well written howto, making the changes I suggest here would relieve much of the drudgery and distraction from authoring. Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
