Interesting post / problem, and reminiscent of Pages Corp. Pages program for NeXTstep.
It's my understanding that some such concepts are being considered (were considered?) in LaTeX 3. Peter Wilson's Memoir Class shows that one can have a wonderfully flexible documentclass w/ a lot of options w/ just LaTeX2e though, so it should be possible to my mind to just write a documentclass w/ all (or most) of the desired options, and just access them through a dialogue box as is done now. This would be a lot easier than: >What I would loved was that some people with LaTeX knowledge, programming >skills and stamina got together and wrote a LyX style utility. I envisage >this "LyX-styler" as a separate program, and that LyX still comes with a >handful of nice usable layouts that would suit most people writing letters, >and other none complicated texts. The LyX-styler would be run when people >needed a special typesetting. It should write LyX preambles, .layout .bst and >.sty-files. It must have a GUI. Which would be specific / limited to LyX. Also a huge programming task 'cause TeX is a bit more flexible, hence intractable than say PostScript. William
