Hi all, I just commented, in another post, about how difficult it would make it on people to change the LyX native format. And yet it *does* change.
Must have been about 10 years ago, the developers started transitioning the LyX native format to XML, and began by making it much more XML like, which made homegrown shellscript parsing more difficult. But thanks to outside-XML use of whitespace in LyX's pidgeon XML, it's still fairly script parsable. For some reason, in the last several years, the change to XML bogged down. LyX "XML" is still neither valid nor well-formed. Which means you can't use an XML parser and hierarchy methods on it, the way you could if it were real XML. The example I brought up in the past was ePub export. Although Alex Fernandez did a spectacular job with his eLyXer XHTML export, which produced HTML with the same appearance as PDF exports of a file, his export and that of the LyX team that built their own both produced (X)HTML inappropriate for ePub. ELyXer was 10K lines of code. If LyX were a single well formed and valid XML hierarchy, I could probably write the right XHTML export in 1000 lines. A person wanting an XHTML for a different purpose could do likewise. A whole cottage industry of LyX addons would spring up, now that anyone with Python and one of the Python XML parsers could manipulate the document to his/her heart's content. I know what I'm asking for is monsterously difficult, and I know I certainly don't have the technical chops to do it. But when it gets done, LyX will be a brand new world, finally living up to its promise of write once, deploy everywhere. Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt July 2017 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz
