Hi all! On Monday 16 December 2002 19:38, Mark Carroll wrote:
(snip) > You've certainly been echoing my thoughts. Well, mine too. I also looking for a GUI-based layout designing app some time ago. What I imagined was something similar to the well known commercial typesetting systems (QuarkXpress or Xerox's Ventura), but only for generating the layout. the typesetting itself would be (in my dreams:)) ) done by latex and between the layout and latex one could use LyX for the input. Does it sound strange a bit? Well, if you think, that LyX has its pre-defined layouts and (but) basically it seems to use latex's layouts, styles etc, the answer is no. After a while I found that there are three solutions to the problem: 1) use the memoir class, which is easier to use for typesetting books with custom layout, but you are not out of the "LyX-layout latex-class LyX-latex-preamble" kind of approach. 2) write a program which is entirely based on memoir.cls, a kind of front-end for it, being this way a bit "limited" 3) write an app which would help the user to include any kind of class or package. The user would sometimes not even notice a new inclusion in this case, since a lot of the functions would be implemented in the program itself (or -horrors- would be extracted from the classes found on the user's machine: a very hard, but interesting task to solve...): thus, if for example the user wanted a rotated text wich appears on every page, he/she put a box (this is just an example!!!) in the right position, rotated it, and it's done. In the background the the program would just insert the inclusion for the needed package and commands in the preamble (if we are talking about an app that would not be used to create/modify styles or layouts, but to change document layouts by inserting commands in their preambles) or the layout file. Another approach would be a mix of solution 2 and 3. The only drawback of my dream is, that it has not too much to do with the TeX-LaTeX-LyX approach. Anyway, a discussion on this topic would be very important from my point of view. Sorry for being so long, and for my english. Giovanni
