Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'll try to answer to some of your
> concerns.
Thanks, Jean-Marc, for answering. I was really getting worried that my
report about LyX's death were not that exaggerated (BTW, it is so
over-quoted citation, that I was not able to google its canonical form :-),
when no-one replied to my message for some time, but it was probably caused
by the external factors (i.e., New Year :-).
> Matej> 2) So although LyX probably cannot be considered dead yet, its
> Matej> development is even slower than global warming and there are
> Matej> many issues from small to big which are just not addressed.
>
> I never thought of LyX as 'dead', but it may be that I cannot face the
> truth :) I agree though that things are not going very well currently
> now.
Would you share some thoughts when 1.4.0 will go out? At least some really
haphazard (but hopefully at least somehow educated) guess would be helpful.
> I think there is some truth in the fact that LyX tends to be a
> "programmers' project". For our defense, I would say that the rewrites
> we have to do are also to blame for the period when it was a "users'
> project" in a bad way, which meant that it had no real foundation to
> build on.
I thought so and therefore I tried to be very non-agressive in writing that.
> Also, we have a growing interest for the native OSX and Windows
> versions, and I hope this is going to help attract other people to
> help.
Just contrary to what Steve writes, I would think that if dropping anything
then I would let XForms go and made LyX into a first-class KDE citizen.
> Matej> 3) Moreover, one of the projects which was silently dropped and
> Matej> will be addressed probably sometimes around the time orange
> Matej> farms move from Florida to Boston (or from Spain to my native
> Matej> Czechia) is support for scripting of LyX.
>
> Indeed.
The impulse for writing the original email (or making otherwise trivial
message into this kind of long novel) was my first slightly more deep
looking into OpenOffice.org. I have found two things: a) that it sucks in
many more ways than I could imagine, b) it is absolutely unbelievable how
easily I could change things with a little effort -- when I found myself
fixing Docbook export filters (it is just a piece of XSLT after all; some
40 lines of XSLT templates gave me an export of Bibliography to docbook)
and adding key shortcut support for inline styles (36 lines of StarBasic),
I've got really sick from LyX that it cannot do things like that.
> char-transpose has been available since 1.2.0, I think. Of course,
> this does not mean the problem is not real.
Sorry, then I've made a wrong example, but the point is still valid, IMHO.
> Actually, I would interested to know what your other pet peeves wrt
> LyX are, besides the fact that it does not do scripting and you are
> afraid it may not be there in a few years.
When times when I hoped that bugs are going to be fixed, I filed some bugs
about them -- 253, 254 (I really hate this), 676, 421 (I don't care that
much), 454 (but that is probably too big to resolved anytime soon). Now I
would add these ones:
- yeah, Steve is correct, lack of character (aka inline) styles sucks;
on the other hand, I do not care that much about better style definitions
(I can write LaTeX myself and I do not care that much about the exacty
typesetting of my stuff -- standard LaTeX with some of my fixes is usually
good enough for me)
- annotations support: Guys, sneak somewhere to some Windows computer and
take a look at M$-Word 2003+ and what it can do with revision marks,
comments, etc. I have a tendency to write _a lot_ of comments into
document I write and I want to be able to print them, but not always (when
giving a draft to my supervisor for example). I have tried all possible
creative ways how to do it (see attached myarticle.inc, which gets
included into all of my LyX layouts), but neither of them works really
well. I either use Comment style and cannot insert inline and collaps
them, or I use Insert/Note and then I cannot print them anytime.
- full-size KDE-ization, because of clipboard which sucks, missing session
recovery, and other stuff,
- Unicodization (related to previous) -- at least to the level of what
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} can support, which is not much I know. Guys,
it is 2005 now!
- Docbook bibliography support (after being spoiled by LyX's support of
BibTeX, I just cannot live without Insert/Citation Reference working)
- abbreviations (let's not stirr up anti-M$ passions and let's not call it
Autocorrections :-) -- vim has them (":he abbr"), Emacs has them, why
cannot LyX them as well (of course, switched off on default or with an
empty list of abbreviations)?
- documents revisions (hopefully, it is coming in 1.4.*), but how is it
going to work with RCS/CVS?
- in longer horizont thorough XMLification:
* in the first run Docbook XML (hopefully in 1.4.*?), then bibliography
support for Docbook,
* later ... well, actually, why not switch LyX to save its files in some
kind of subset of OASIS Document format (what is going to be a native
format of OOo 2.0, KOffice, and possibly even AbiWord)? Just throwing
the thought here -- it will certainly need a long dicsussing. Is there
too much supported by AMSTeX and not supported by MathML (which is part
of OOo OASIS format)?
> I will deliberately avoid to mention features that are now only on the
> roadmap, since they are just vapour now.
Is there such list available somewhere -- I would be interested even if it
is vaporware for some time.
> Actually, I would be interested to know what your other griefs with
> LyX are. I know there are a lot of problems, but you mention only a
> few that are relevant to LyX in your message.
See above.
Matej
--
Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej
GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
138 Highland Ave. #10, Somerville, Ma 02143, (617) 623-1488
But if we find we have left our bones to bleach in these desert
sands for nothing, beware the fury of the legions...
-- Centurion in a letter home from North Africa
3rd Century
