I have been playing around with the external inset recently. It started off as "let's see what needs to be done to display the external material within LyX" (like the graphics inset does) and ended up as a bit of a spring clean.
One thing I have done is modify the code so that the external insets use the same "converter" mechanism as used elsewhere by LyX. (The stuff that enables you to see your favourite EPS file on the LyX screen, for example.) At the moment, the external inset uses its own mechanism to do this. (To generate the necessary files that can be processed by the LaTeX compiler for example.) The converter is hard-coded within the template definition but you have the ability to tune its behaviour using the "parameters" variable that you can set in the External dialog. At least that's the idea. In practice, however, the implementation is clunky. We have several different targets that could be tuned in this way. (Latex, docbook, ascii etc) but only one "parameters" variable. In fact, most of the current external inset converters ignore this variable entirely. Now that I have moved things over to the generic converter mechanism, I have a problem with what to do with this pesky variable. It doesn't sit well with the converter concept. (No other converter allows this per-inset tuning.) I propose therefore to remove it. If anybody uses this and would be deeply upset if I did remove it, could they please mail me (or the list of course). -- Angus
