Reply To: Problem using phrases back to back

[Derek Read]

I incorrectly assumed you were using these for reuse, not conditionalizing (I missed where you said you were setting @otherprops and somehow read that as @conref I guess). My bad.

The only way I can get what you are seeing to occur is to:

1. Wrap “red,” in a so that I have this:

red, blue, green.

2. Then instead of selecting “blue,” and wrapping it in I must include the space before the word blue. This makes the selection immediately adjacent to the red,

In that case the second is in fact merged into the first. The dialog has logic in it that makes an assumption that if you insert two phrase-level elements of the same type one immediately following the other (using this dialog) that it should merge them. I think it is a tough call as to what the “correct” behaviour should be (without prompting you, which would probably be annoying).

We keep track of how many people complain about these types of things and so far I have nothing listed in our support channel (so +1 if you really think this is the preferred logic for you, but please elaborate on the other elements in the dialog. I think we'd want to do the same for all of them otherwise it would probably be pretty confusing if it merged two elements but didn't do that for two elements.

There are ways to get what you need:
1. Don't include the space in your selection of “blue,”. This may or may not be what you want.
2. Don't include the space in your selection of “blue,”. Then if you need the space inside the , rather than outside, add it afterwards.
3. Use the Element List to insert the element instead of this dialog. The dialog has this additional logic. The Element List pretty much just inserts exactly what you tell it to insert (except for special cases like image where it helps you by throwing up the Insert Image dialog).

I have done a DIFF on the code for this dialog and it has not changed, so I suspect you must have changed the way you are working, or perhaps you never ran into this case before.

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