(Forgot to reply to the full list again. My apologies Helge.)
@ Vincent - The installer would be different, and LyX would have to not give
error messages for messed-up layout files. See my notes below.
@all - Regarding MicroLyX (tested on Windows) -
I recalled that LyX could be run without a LaTeX distro installed, so I
tried it. I ran Win XP in my virtualbox and tried installing a light-weight
LyX with the current binary installer. Here's how it went:
1. Downloaded the install binary, about 20 Mb, which is fine as far as
I'm concerned.
2. Started the installer. I was only asked three things: (a) do I want
latex (no), (b) what language should LyX use (English) and (c) what language
dictionaries do I want (I chose English).
3. After installing most of what I needed, it downloaded the aspell
software and installed it. I thought that Python was required for LyX (it
used to be required), but this apparently is no longer the case, which is
nice.
Overall, the full-LyX installer had no trouble installing a minimal LyX
system.
Then I tried running LyX. I got an error saying:
The layout file requested by this document, article.layout, is not
usable. This is probably because the LaTeX class or style file required is
not available. See the Customization documentation for more information.
LyX will not be able to produce output.
Once I clicked out of that, I was able to work within the document just
fine. You can only view those document types you can create. Therefore, I
was not given the option to view a pdf or postscript version of the
document, so I was not able to bother LyX asking it to do something it
couldn't do. I did not text image viewing/conversion, but in my experience
when you insert an image that LyX does not know how to convert, it
automatically displays a message along the lines of "Could not convert this
image for display."
Conclusion: for windows, installing a stripped-down LyX is easy except that
it always complains about the layout file. MicroLyX could easily just be a
recompilation of LyX that does not generate those warnings (and uses a
different title), accompanied by a separate installer.
Any thoughts?
David
