On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 10:43 PM, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > On Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:22:17 +0100 > Rainer M Krug <r.m.k...@gmail.com> wrote: >> This all sounds very exciting and extremely useful for import / >> export / collaboration, but there is one aspect which I would be >> missing in an XML file: At the moment, I can open a .lyx file with >> emacs and do change / replace in the .lyx file, when e.g. I have >> moved my images around. Or changing anything formating consistently >> throughout the text - this is much more time consuming in LyX itself. >> So my question: would this new XML format mean the "good bye" to the >> plain text format of the .lyx file, or would the XML be a new >> parallel, fully (and I mean fully!) equivalent and exchangeable >> format in LyX? I know that an XML is also a text file, but at least >> the ones I looked into were not nearly as editable as the .lyx plain >> text? > > My impression was that Nico was making a converter to convert LyX > native format to XML, *for export*. If anybody is making LyX format any > more XML than it already is, I object strenuously for the exact reason > you stated --- I like working on and diagnosing LyX files in Vim. In > the twelve years I've used LyX, its native format has constantly become > harder for a human to deal with.
That is what I'm doing, plus an XSL to produce .lyx from the XML. As for the editability of .lyx vs. XML... well, both are editable in $EDITOR. And XML benefits from the ability to use XPath, XSL, ..., so that if you have such XML tools at hand (and you would have to if LyX were to switch to a native XML format) then you'd have a much easier time doing programmatic transformations outside LyX than you do with the current .lyx format. Also, if LyX were to switch to a native XML format then my script and XSLs could still be used to produce old-style .lyx for editing the way you want to. Such tools would still need to be supported for a long time for migration purposes. > XML itself is incredibly human-hostile, but its misuse by developers is > astounding. Look at the XML for an OpenOffice file as an example. > Probably six different files, with all sorts of redundant information > scattered within those files. If you change something in one file > without changing its count in another, it simply breaks the file. It's not XML that demands "six files". > Then there's the fact that some of us tweak our Lyx files with a Perl, > Python, Ruby or Lua script before actually compiling it. This was easy > [...] See above! Nico --
