On Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:02:15 -0500 stefano franchi <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Les Denham <lden...@hal-pc.org> > wrote: > > I use LyX rather than Word (or its clones) because it allows me to > > produce a presentable document in about half the time it takes with > > Word. This is emphatically the case if it is a document requiring a > > detailed table of contents, an index, or a bibliography, or if it > > contains figures, cross-references or footnotes. > > > > > I guess that's the very reason why we all use LyX. I certainly > wouldn't be as productive in Word. But those of us working in the > Humanities (at least some Humanities) then have to budget some time > to convert the output to Word. Nothing else is accepted. I tend to > think best-sellers authors' position is closer to us than to a > physicist's, a mathematician's or a logician's. That's why a minimal > and yet reliable LyX-to-Doc converter---a topic we've repeatedly > discussed on the list---would make such a difference to the > non-technical user, IMHO. Stephano, you bring up an important point... Ten years ago, I used LyX only because it was a front end to LaTeX. Now I use it because it's an ultra-fast, styles-enforcing wordprocessor. I've used it to make Kindle eBook (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006QTBLA2), which has absolutely nothing to do with LaTeX. Now I'm making a converter to make it do simple HTML like you'd find on a web page, rather than as input to an eBook. One thing perhaps I haven't appreciated til now is what a good, fast and efficient wordprocessor LyX is. It knows when you press space twice it was a mistake and only prints one space. It knows when you press Enter twice that it's a mistake and prints only one. It makes fingerprinting difficult, which is just what I want. And I've never had LyX lose my work. These days, it could be used as a front end to anything with the proper styles defined, and the proper converter. So the same LyX file could be used to output LaTeX, MSWord doc, XHTML, HTML, simple HTML, or who knows what else. To more easily accommodate this, it seems to me like layout files should be split into an input side and an output side, with the output side capable of multiple output formats. So the input side might look something like this: CharStyle MyEmph Font Shape Italic EndFont if outputtype == latex outputName latexlayout.layout/myemphL outputType Command elsif outputtype == simplehtml outputName simphtmllayout.layout/myemphH outputType InlineTag else outputtype == msword outputName winwordlayout.layout/myemphW outputType CharacterStyle End Environments would be similar. Ideally it would be designed so that it doesn't syntax check inside the output type's it's not. That way you can develop one output type at a time without getting errors from the ones you haven't developed yet. It seems to me that something like this would be a logical way of turning LyX into a universal front end while changing very little of LyX's core code. I'm not a good enough programmer to do this in C++, so feel free to view this suggestion with some healthy skepticism. Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
