Re: [AUCTeX] Font size

[Denis Bitouzé]

Le lundi 31/01/11 à 22h40,
Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> a écrit :

> * Denis Bitouzé (2011-01-30) writes:
> 
> > I think the logical/visual markup separation should not be applied
> > too strictly, especially with beginners. For instance, who actually
> > defines a logical markup command just in order to make bigger the
> > title' size of the document? If you require this for beginners,
> > they will quickly return to their lovely word processor! :)
> 
> At least in Word you wouldn't define a new style for the title but
> change the existing one to suit your needs.  Anyway, if you should use
> logical markup or not depends, among other things, on the properties
> of the document.  As a tendency, the longer your document is and the
> more different types of content (e.g. author names, program code or
> technical terms) it contains the better it is to use it.

I completely agree.

>  But this holds true regardless of the tool to write the document; be
> it a word processor or a markup language.

Yes.

>  So if your students want to return to a word processor, they should
> be aware that they might not use it to its full potential.

Unfortunately, they often don't care, at least for the youngest of
them...

>  And if you teach them logical markup they will learn not just
> something for LaTeX but also for word processors.

I teach them and I insist a lot about that. But, especially when they
start with LaTeX, I don't trouble them with logical markup commands
that would be used just once. For instance, even for a 30 or 50 pages
document, I won't be shocked by a title typeset:

\title{\bfseries\Large My Title}

> > And, after all, font styles (bold face, italic, typewriter, small
> > caps, etc. and, in a lesser measure, emphasize) also are visual
> > markup but they are provided as menus by AucTeX. Why not font sizes?
> 
> Hm, that's true.  Perhaps we should remove the menu entries for the
> fonts then? (c;

I strongly suggest the other way round! ;)

> > Have you an example? I can't think of any case where it could
> > fail...
> 
> You could probably detect the case where there is an empty line before
> and after the paragraph and the case where a \par is at the end of a
> marked region.  In the latter case you wouldn't add an additional
> \par. But since you can always do something like
> \newcommand{\foo}{\par} you could encounter cases where you'd
> erroneously add a \par.  I'm sure there are other cases where such a
> mechanism would fail.

Maybe adding a \par command could be suggested.
-- 
Denis