[Ipe-discuss] Stylesheet usability

[Otfried Cheong]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, at 16:32, Tim Hutt via Ipe-discuss wrote:
> 1. It doesn't seem possible to have an embedded style-sheet - if I want 
> just one file to be a weird size I have to make a stylesheet specific 
> to that file, and then remember to copy it around with that file. It's 
> a bit awkward. An implicit "(embedded)" stylesheet would be great.

When you add a style sheet to an Ipe document, the sheet becomes part of the document - it is embedded inside.  I'm not sure why you think this is not the case or why you would need to copy around the style sheet.

> 2. In the stylesheets dialog there is a convenient Edit button but I 
> have never actually successfully used it because it always tells me 
> there is no text editor configured. I assume to do that I have to edit 
> the `prefs.lua` file which is ... somewhere... This is usually way more 
> hassle than I want to deal with so I give up. I can think of two good 
> solutions:

You should *never* edit prefs.lua - instead, put your customizations into ~/.ipe/ipelets/customization.lua, so they will be preserved when you update Ipe.    See http://ipe.otfried.org/manual/manual_39.html.

I agree this isn't as simple as the preferences in some other software, but on the other hand Ipe is much more configurable (you can actually rewrite a large part of the UI if you so desire), and it's something you only need to learn once in your life with Ipe :-)

Thanks for the suggestions for default editors on Windows and MacOS.    There are plenty of features in Ipe that I never use myself - I will never notice if they are not as usable as they should be if nobody gives me feedback.    So don't let the annoyance build up, but file an issue!

"open -W -n -e" indeed seems to work fine on MacOS, except that you need to be careful to use "Quit TextEdit" rather than "Close", and that the "Waiting for external editor" dialog remains on-screen (but it's a zombie, you can just continue to use Ipe).  I'm pretty sure this worked in an earlier MacOS version, I'll have to figure out what's wrong.    Again something that I would have never noticed myself because I do not have a Mac myself.

Cheers,
  Otfried