I want to like LyX: it has the right attitude, saying don’t bother me with choosing a font style and size, concentrate on the meaning of what I’m writing.
Reading an introduction to it (years ago), I quickly came up against this nugget (paraphrased):
To emphasise text, don’t mark it “italic”. The LyX way is to mark it with “emphasis”. The default rendering of “emphasis” is italic.
So far so good, if emphasis is what I want.
Let’s say I’m writing about part names and project names and I want to make those terms stand out like I’ve done here — partly to emphasise them, I suppose, but also to group related terms together, and potentially later on I may want to distinguish the part names from the product names by displaying them in different ways. I don’t just want these terms lumped together with ever other phrase that’s emphasized.
How do I define and apply the new semantic mark-up for “part name” to the part names (default rendering: italic), and “project name” to the project names (default rendering: also italic)?
Last I looked, LyX didn’t make it easy.
Unfortunately the take-away impression was more like this: for italic, press the “Emphasis” button or Control-E; for bold, press the “Strong” button or Control-S.
The button for applying the style “part name” needs to appear next to those for the predefined styles such as “emphasis”. And when I first decide I want a style for a part name, I need to create this new style very quickly and easily.
Of course I’m not talking only about italics. This attitude should pervade any semantic mark-up software such as LyX.
