On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, John Levon wrote: > On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 04:55:07PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: [...] > > We discussed this feature at the last LyX developers meeting > > in Norway, but we did not have the time to implement it. I don't > > think it would be too hard to do it, but the real question is this: > > If people do not understand what the external inset in its present > > form is able to do > > I understand what it can do. And it is extremely limited. Random example: spellcheck. > Random example 2: copy and paste. Basically the entire lyx internals are not > available (of course you know this).
Your random examples are irrelevent. The external inset is designed to plugin what should be considered a single glyph. If there is anything that can be spellchecked in it then the user of that external program will have to do that spellcheck there -- this is not a problem for LyX. Copy and paste is just a silly example IMHO because you would at most want to copy and paste the whole inset not some fraction thereof. It's all external. You plugin whatever you can dream of and find an application to support you. For Jules example graphviz seems the likely best candidate since it allows the specification of connections and nodes and will render them for you. > > Furthermore, I think we should draw another bold conclusion: Nobody would > > really make full use of a complete document API either. People might > > say that they would, but in reality, it would still be simpler just to > > hack the LyX code itself. > > I agree with this, I was just playing devil's advocate against your comment that > the external inset can do anything remotely like what was asked for : it can't. Perhaps the wrong question was being asked of it? At some stage in the future when InsetExternal and InsetGraphics start sharing some of their code and make full use of converters then LyX should be able to display internally whatever the external inset material is. For example the chess diagrams could probably be displayed as eps figures. Until then external viewers are needed. If the external inset made use of converters (the existing python scripts can be made into converters instead of being called explicitly) we could have our cake and eat it too. As it is the external inset does come close to doing almost everything Jules wanted. Dia could certainly be used for Jules requirements after all he is currently filling in a large array with arrows and maths -- why wouldn't Dia be able to do similar to this just as effectively or just as visually? (hint: turn on snap-to-grid and set the grid spacing appropriately then save as the default) These settings would give a similar degree of complexity in the UI interface for building the same diagram. Allan. (ARRae)
