On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 04:55:07PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > 2) In a distant future, the entire LyX document data-structure is > inspectable and manipulatable via an API. I.e. LyX becomes > a component in the sense of COM technology on Windows, or > KParts in KDE. An external application can then use this API > to inspect and modify the data inside LyX. > Realistically, we will not reach this scenario in at least > two years, since the internal API is not stable itself.
I don't think it is such a hard task, actually. I'm not talking about external accesibility with a formal interface. I'm talking about a simple python layer which has access to some of the main methods of some of the main objects. If it takes two years it's because no one cares to write it (fair enough) not because it is so difficult to do. > > And now you ask: "How can the simply external material inset be > used for this?" Well, the beauty of the external material inset > is that it is simple, but still extremely powerful. > > The crucial feature is that it provides an option to produce > arbitrary LaTeX output and stitch that inside the final output. Yes. True. But there *is* no external program to draw commutative diagrams that we could call. And even if there were, the poor external program would have to contain a re-implementation of mathed for the labels and arrow-labels. Jules
