Mike> Hello Angus,
Mike> Mike Ressler of the LyX Doc Team here ...
Mike> Just curious as to where natbib support is on your priority list? I would
Mike> dearly like to see this implemented, but there is a reason that I write
Mike> docs instead of code :-) The lack of natbib support is the only reason I
Mike> haven't made a lot of noise with the American Astronomical Society about
Mike> recommending LyX as a frontend for AASTeX articles. Everything about
Mike> AASTeX can be adequately represented by modern versions of LyX with the
Mike> sole exception of \citep and \citet. There are a few other trivial
Mike> instances of ERT required, of course, but the lack of an adequate citation
Mike> mechanism greatly reduces LyX's appeal. I can certainly help with design
Mike> philosophy and interpreting the natbib docs as well as trying out any
Mike> patches submitted, but will need to rely on your coding skills to actually
Mike> make it happen.
Hi, Mike.
If you have a recent version of lyx (by which I mean 1.1.6 cvs ;-(), then
you'll see that I have redesigned the citation dialog completely.
A quick summary of what we can do now:
browse the list of bibliography keys and insert/delete keys from the current
inset. Pretty self explanatory. The outputed LaTeX, however, is unchanged from
earlier versions of LyX.
My plans for progress (in some sort of order):
1. a little internal clean up. The code has been changed almost totally to use
the GUI-independence way of doing things that so far has generated a lot of
noise but little of substance! It's almost solid but not quite.
[Specifically, the passing of information to lyxfunc::Dispatch as a string
shuld be improved. See my earlier InsetCommandParams suggestion.]
2. The current "BibTeX Generated References" inset that appears at the end of
the document is a waste of space and (IMO) misguided. It shouldn't be an inset
as this suggests that you can have more than one. It should be part of the
Layout->Document menu dialog. It's planned to rewrite this dialog as a tabbed
list, one of which will be "Bibliography".
[This will lead to the creation of a new class Biblio that will handle the
current insets functionality and will also take over the paragraph's list of
bibitems.]
So far, no additional (LaTeX) content, just more coherence.
3. Content starts to appear. The "Bibliography" section of the Layout->Document
menu should support:
a. choice of citation package. (default, cite, citesort, NATBIB! etc)
b. an input mechanism for the style parameters of that particular
package.
c. an ability to input \nocite keys. I visulalise something similar to
the current citation dialog's pair of browsers. Users would simply
pick which keys to \nocite.
Note that switching from \cite to \citep etc is straightforward as the user is
providing more information. Switching back (from \citep, \citet to \cite)
will lose this information. Some thought therefore is needed on an appropriate
LyX file format that can retain this information if the user switches from
natbib to default citations and then back again.
4. Modify the citation dialog to allow the user to choose the citation command
when in natbib mode. Natbib also supprts the input of text before the citation.
Both these changes are trivial (and are infact encoded in the dialog at least).
You can see, I hope, that I've been thinking about this quite hard. Comments
are, however, very welcome (indeed they're solicited!)
Coding is a slow but steady business. Spare time only of course!
Angus
