On Tue, 6 Nov 2018 18:51:50 +0200 Dr Eberhard Lisse <nos...@lisse.na> wrote:
> On 2018-11-05 23:45 , Steve Litt wrote: > > Retina display and iOS and all this Apple compatibility is nice, but > > I'll repeat, it's not 2008 and PDF is no longer the only game in > > town, and I think priority should be placed on finishing what was > > started in July of 2008. > > So you are joing the development team? A timely question. I've joined the development team, just not the *LyX* development team. Instead, I'm developing Stylz, a native format dedicated to fast authoring via an editor, dedicated to easily enabling the author to declare and use custom styles, and dedicated to be exportable, *with semantic completeness and correctness*, to any conceivable output format. Stylz is new and raw, but right now it does an excellent job of outputting HTML and ePub. The PDF export (via Plain TeX plus a small handful of addons) currently gives wrong results, and I need help on the PDF export. Unlike LyX' "HTML export", Stylz' style to appearance conversion happens via style files such as CSS for HTML and TeX macros for PDF. Styles are preserved to the very last moment, and Style to appearance conversion is different on each output format. So, for instance, an emphasis character style could be italic in PDF, but straight and backgrounded by light yellow in HTML or ePub. To assist the author in style definitions, Stylz includes a style lister that lists every style used in a document. It also includes a CSS boilerplate maker that makes boilerplate CSS for every style in the document. I'll probably do the same thing for boilerplate Plain TeX style-implementing macros. Like all software, Stylz fills a niche. If you know for sure your document will never need to be in a format other than PDF/paper, use LyX. As many have noted in this thread, LyX is dedicated to being a front end to LaTeX for the purpose of PDF/paper output. If you want some degree of choice in output format, including PDF and HTML, and your output needs are so simple as not to require custom styles, use asciidoc. And if you need exportability to PDF, HTML, ePub, and anything in the future for which a Stylz export has been authored, and you also need to make and use customized styles, Stylz fills your needs. Stylz works as follows: stylz2xml parses the author-friendly Stylz format and converts to XML, from where anything can be done. The XML has *all* information contained in the Stylz file, with absolutely no regard to its own viewability. xml2html converts the XML to HTML. From there, html2epub converts it to ePub. It takes less than a second for my dual core AMD with 16GB RAM to convert all the way from stylz to ePub, and as I mentioned, for the most part the produced ePub is ready for prime time. Where I need help is xml2tex, or, if you choose, perhaps a pandoc or XSLT solution if it's reasonably simple and well documented and commented. I want to avoid using LaTeX in the conversion because it would require too much "other peoples code", increasing the error surface, and making troubleshooting harder. I'm only one guy, wedging Stylz development between my other activities and responsibilities, so in most cases I did what seemed the quickest, so Stylz is a mix of Python, awk, sed, and /bin/sh. Python has some great XML parsers, which is what I really needed. I anticipate the license will be either GPL2 or Expat (https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Expat). So anyone interested in writing the Stylz XML to PDF converter, please get in touch with me. SteveT Steve Litt November 2018 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting Brand new, second edition http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr
