On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:08:45PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, John Levon wrote: > > : inset external CANNOT and DOES NOT do what Jules was asking for. > > > > That's all I'm saying. > > Nothing does what Jules is asking for.
That's what I thought. That's why I asked for it. > > I had just said that the external inset is inappropriate for > extending LaTeX support in LyX. That is the area that Jules is most > wanting. Yes. Easy ability to extend LaTeX support to new macros or new packages that you, the lyx-team, hadn't thought of. > This became much clearer after I read the comp.text.tex thread and > found out what he really wants: a tool that lets him type in LaTeX > (macros, newcommands that lot) and provides both an editing window and > a dvi rendering of the codes he's typing in (preferably as he types > them). Ah, no. That's something else I want. It's not what I want from LyX, since that's not what LyX does. To be honest, the main point of my insistence in that thread was to sing loud the point that the above is actually possible: you really can conceive of an interactive TeX engine. (Indeed, I learnt of at least two implementations of the idea in the thread, so I was right ;-) > This would indeed be a fantastic inset. It could in fact be fairly > easy to arrange -- the document preamble and class settings are taken > from the document being edited; the contents of the insets raw tex > buffer is placed in the file and the resulting dvi is then viewed > (hopefully cropped to just the resulting virtual ink -- or let the > user define this in a separate xdvi window). Wow. Now that also isn't what I'm asking for, but is actually rather good, and it seems to me wouldn't be too hard to implement. In fact, it would be the Kastrup preview-latex idea, implemented in LyX. We know it's feasible to crop the virtual ink, because Kastrup does [1]. It really seems to me that this would be an easy inset: just straightforward text-editing in its expanded form, much like InsertERT, but its 'collapsed' form would have the novel effect of making a mini-TeX document, executing dvips -E, and embedding a gs-rendering of the produced eps. However, just to repeat myself silly, this *isn't* what I was asking for. I was asking for the ability to define a new type of inset. My particular example inset would look like a Table, but all the cells would be automatically mathed (like a mathed array). I want to have mathed's editing power inside it. It would also have arrows between elements of the arrow, and mathed boxes above the arrows to label them. But none of that was the point. The point was just to make it easier to do such constructs, and other ones (proofs, for example, or trees). Anyhow, I love the InsetLaTeX idea... Jules [1]: http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net/
