What are you trying to do with lyx that does not work now?
I will gladly add those features that you need. ![:-)]()
I am looking for a solution to the problem today, but I'm delighted to
help you work on LyX improvements. You really should get input from
users who are more experienced with DocBook SGML in other toolsets --
Chris Karakas is clearly one of the most experienced with DocBook and
LyX. His list of workarounds for problems he's found is pretty
comprehensive.
I'm not sure what you mean by "character layout styles" below --
perhaps these will show the structured elements available within a top
level environment? If so, I would prefer to see them in the
"environment" pulldown window on the toolbar, not via
Layout->Character... which seems to be intended for preformat
control of font. In the DocBook DTD the <author> element may
contain a variety of other elements, including the "person.ident.mix"
element which may contain <honorific>, <firstname>,
<surname>, <lineage>, <othername>,
<affiliation>, <authorblurb>, and <contrib>. It may
NOT contain straight character strings, esp. "Alex Brown
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>",
where the angle brackets clearly are dangerous
to SGML.
Here are my comments:
- The <author> structure you show below is a helpful example
-- Karakas shows how to insert an inline SGML environment as a
workaround. He reports that LyX 1.3.x DocBook support is circa version
3.1, not current 4.2, but it seems that even that is simplified; the
tags available are only slightly more complex than LinuxDoc.
- There are a great number of such environment tags in DocBook,
most of them elements valid only within containers. DocBook is an
unusually large and complex DTD but this is typical of SGML work. It
would of course be ideal to see in the environment pulldown list on the
toolbar, only the tags available for elements within the current LyX
environment, instead of all tags in the DTD.
- DocBook is standardized and varies with successive versions, but
in
general DTDs may be customized to a particular organization's needs.
It would be ideal to be able to work in LyX with any valid SGML DTD. I
know that the heritage of LyX is TeX, not SGML, so I don't expect this
to be easy. I haven't looked at LyX source yet and have no idea if
the following question is serious or ridiculous: Can this environment
structure in the LyX GUI be generated from a DTD so that LyX can work
with DocBook DTDs at various version levels (or any other DTDs)?
Rebuilding LyX for use with a particular DTD is an acceptable solution.
- LyX does not appear to validate environment or tag use at all --
I realize that without integration with jade this may be impossible.
- As an improvement, it would be extremely helpful to see an error
message window from "db2dvi" etc when one of the "view" options is
selected on the main toolbar, and its processing results in errors (on
stderr). These error messages tend to give hints about structure
problems of this sort. My workaround is a Makefile to build the
product files (HTML, PDF etc) from SGML, which I run separately from
Emacs and thus I'm able to use the Emacs error message parsing to track
down the offending SGML line. This works quite well. Such error
parsing in LyX, to point out a LyX environment with a problem, would be
ideal as a long term solution.
Good luck with future versions of LyX. For now, "writing in LyX,
thinking in SGML" as Chris puts it, will have to do for me.
--
Alex Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +1 617 308 9456
Jose' Matos wrote:
One important feature for 1.4 lyx are the character layout styles, the
inline equivalents of layout styles. Notice the attached picture where
the firstname and surname appear differently.
Any suggestion to improve lyx ability to deal with docbook is welcome.
{screenshot deleted}
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