Re: [AUCTeX] Font size

[Ralf Angeli]

* 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.  But this holds true
regardless of the tool to write the document; be it a word processor or
a markup language.  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.  And if you teach them logical markup they will learn not
just something for LaTeX but also for word processors.

> 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;

>> > Would it be possible to detect, when the user asks for font
>> > size changes of a selected region if it is (an) entire paragraph(s)
>> > and add a "\par" command?
>> 
>> I guess so.  But this will likely not work in every case.
>
> 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.

-- 
Ralf