Hi all! On Tuesday 17 December 2002 19:40, Matej Cepl wrote: > You are trying to beat dead horse to run. Not that LaTeX would be > dead, but it is absolutely not suited for being the backend for > typesetting general layouts. That's not what it was prepared for.
Ok. let's try to clear some concepts, that may be a bit confused in my mind. But for the reason, that it is the same mind that is writing this very letter, I'll try to explain my ideas about the argument. What I was trying to propose would not use LaTeX to typeset general layouts. The envisioned GUI would help the user to define layouts that can be used in latex. As we all know, Latex provides a lot of commands to do this (you can define the size of a page, just to keep it simple), if it wasn't the case, then latex would just stand for a language, that enables you to write macros, and then input a text, which exits somewhere, basically unchanged. Not only it provides these commands, but it has classes that "extend" these commands, and others that include a number of classes. "Backend" may have been a wrong use of terminology of mine, so let's clear this point too. If you design a layout using for example the layouts package and then view it, you basically write a latex file, compile it with latex and view it with xdvi or dvips->gv. From another point of view, you are _just_ writing a layout which can be viewed by translating the human readeable commands _with latex_. After doing the layout (preamble to a file, .sty file or whatever) you can input the text (call the style and so on), and finally compile the document which you defined _by its content and its layout_. So you do not jump out of latex (and LyX of course, but with the restriction that lyx does not explicitly "encourage" the user to do it this way). And this is the point where comes in sight the typographer-designer. This may be a very stupid question, but does the typographer (I will use the term "typographer" to denote a person who is interested in the look of the document [a book, for example] at least as the author is in its content) really have to learn the latex terminology just to output a typographically beautiful (or not beautiful, but self-designed) book, or may there be a way to avoid this. **From some point of view LyX itself has been made to ease people's job!** Why not doing a further step on this path? May be with a program (or a menu item), that knows some classes of a (la)tex distro (maybe hard-wired) or can extend itself, or knows memoir.cls and so on and containing (maybe documented) options for those classes may do the job, by being controlled by the user trough a GUI (or form etc.). After using the GUI, you can always modify the layout by hand, if you want, but you _have something _designed_. The point is using existing classes, but easying their use. Giovanni
