On Dec 20, 2006, at 2:26 AM, Piero D'Ancona wrote:
Haris: you mentioned that a command using a mouse is unacceptable. I do not understand this and I am intrigued, would you elaborate?
I also hate the mouse and love the keyboard, as any other respectable geek. But this is only because keyboard is much faster and much more accurate. But I have no ideological stance against the mouse. If at some point I find that using a mouse is much more convenient for some purpose, I use it immediately. E.g., I would not draw a picture using the keyboard (neither would you I guess).
So the point with the interface for labels is exactly that I feel the keyboard is not the faster tool for the task; clicking in a nice list is indeed faster.
I guess this is where we disagree. I don't think clicking on the list is faster. If I am in the middle of typing a lot of stuff, I would have to stop that and move my hand to the mouse in order to click at the appropriate label, probably would also have to scroll around a bit.
This of course depends on the list we are talking about, and the way you use the keyboard to select an item. If you just use the arrow keys, and there are 100 items there, then of course it won't be as fast. If you use the first letters to narrow things down first, then it is faster I think. Further, in the context menu you have the option of using either the mouse or the keyboard, to make your selection. With the HTML window, you have no such option.
It's not a question of an ideological stance, I just don't think this labels thing is best accomplished via a mouse-only interface, at least not without an alternative. When writing math, the last thing on my mind is using the mouse.
As far as the HTML view is concerned, I actually think that you should make the entire text, instead of just the \label{..} parts, clickable. The user should be able to just hover over the correct block of text and click, instead of having to track down the small region where the \label part is. That would make it more usable imo.
Another idea would be to have the text, or perhaps more of the text, show up as a tool tip when you hover over an item in the HTML view.
I like the idea of having the HTML view as an optional method, after some polishing (like automatic updating in the background, perhaps different coloring of the equations or something like that), but I don't think it should be the only way, i.e. replace the existing label completion command.
I should also mention that I proposed to the PDFView's brilliant developer (Andrea Bergia) to implement a click-on- the-formula feature (you click on the formula in pdf and the \ref is inserted in the tex file...)
That is an interesting idea indeed. Though this might be a bit more editor-specific than the plain pdfsync. It would probably require some javascript calls. I would actually prefer it if somehow the \ref is passed to the clipboard, instead of being inserted directly into TM. It is probably also easier to implement, though I'm not sure the pdf file has this information at all.
Piero
Haris