On 20. april 2013 23:08, Liviu Andronic wrote:
Helge, Pavel,
Do you think you could take a look at this student's proposal and give
some feedback?
Ok, here are some ideas:
The point of a "layout editor" is to be simpler than actually editing
.layout files.
* The user should not need any knowledge of the .layout file format
* ability to load the existing .layout files, for use as examples
* The editor should understand any .layout that LyX accepts, preferably
using the same parser. That also helps avoiding problems
with LyX and the layout editor getting out of sync.
* The editor should never produce a .layout with syntax errors.
(There might be latex errors of course - if the user make them)
* Aim for completeness - anything that can be written in a .layout
should be doable in the editor. (Not necessarily from the
beginning though.)
Often, users say "I have this .sty file for latex, how can I use it in
LyX?" So it'd be nice if the editor could also help with this.
For example, identify all latex environments defined, so the user can
pick some to create paragraph types or charstyles and so on.
Another common case is that the user wants a style using concepts that
LyX already support. For example a text style that higlights with green
underlined text. Or a new paragraph type that is centered by default.
LyX can already do it, but the user want to apply "mystyle" to words
instead of first making them green and then underlining them. (And later
they can change the style to red strikeout smallcaps without having to
change every word.)
In such cases, it'd be nice to be able to create the style without
thinking of TeX commands. I.e. compose a new text style by applying
markup to a "demo word", the same way you do it in LyX. (You get a new
buffer where you can add the markup you want. Such as green and
underline. When saving, it is saved as a custom .layout.
That would solve a lot of real-world use cases - and no need to teach
the user LaTeX or other file formats at all. Of course, advanced users
can add TeX commands too by using the TeX button.
Helge Hafting
