Graphical tour needs links
Long time no speak! It's good to see that folks are still working on LyX. Anyway, I was looking at the LGT and noticed that there's no "next" link at the bottom of the page. "I thought the LGT was longer than that?!" Oh, it turns out you can use the navbar to get to the next page. I think many users won't notice that, though. Keep up the good work! -Amir Karger ex-documentation/reLyX guy
Re: The LyX licence
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 14:55:35 +, Angus Leeming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dear all, Hi, all! > In light of all this, I'm asking whether I can have your permission to add > your names to http://www.lyx.org/blanket-permission.txt: > > "The following people hereby grant permission to licence their contributions > to LyX under the Gnu General Public Licence, version 2 or later." > > so that we can have a permanent record of those people who have contributed > code to LyX and who are happy for this code to be licenced under the GPL. Yes, you may add my name. I still check lyx.org every few months for nostalgia's sake. Best of luck with the devel efforts, and I'm still waiting for the day that someone tells me I ought to use this brand spanking new WYSIWYM document processor... -Amir Karger ps Don't know if I ever mentioned to most of you that I got my first job out of grad school because they basically asked just one question at the interview: can you do OO Perl? And I, having learned OO Perl to write reLyX, answered yes!
Re: The LyX licence
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 12:33:23 +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>>>> "Amir" == Amir Karger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Hello Amir, nice to hear from you again! Hey, JM! > Amir> And I, having learned OO Perl to write reLyX... > > Currently, one of the hot topics is getting rid of reLyX, since we > have no perl hacker anymore :) Yes, well, if reLyX only as good as it was when I left it several years ago, I hope you take it out behind the barn and shoot it! I mean, not only was it sitting on top of Text::TeX v0.01 (which AFAIK never progressed any further and had known bugs), it was also the project I learned OO Perl with. Yuck! In the meantime, I found a much more useless hobby of Perl Golf. Gave that up for my second-to-latest (and completely useless) project, translating (Infocom-ish) Z-machine files into Perl, which was supposed to develop into making Parrot able to read Z-machine files directly. Only I left that for my current project, which is doing no programming at all because I am totally overwhelmed with (a longer commute and) having two kids. I've heard rumors that some people actually had three (like my parents) but I'm sure that's an urban legend. But I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the LyX creature. Anyway, good luck. -Amir
Re: GUI TeX
On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 12:38:40PM +0100, Simon Dales wrote: > UKTUG is having an informal meeting in Oxford 27th July 2001. We are > going to be discussing GUI frontends to TeX, and obviously LyX is part > of that canon. Would you like send a delegate/speaker? > > I don't know all of your emails, so I just picked this from the bottom > of your webpage Hello, Simon. Thanks for your email. I'd love to come, but I'm a bit far from England. We do have a couple Brits on the development team who might be able to make it. I'm forwarding this to the lyx development list, where they'll see it. You can address any future correspondence to that address, too. -Amir
Release version
I'm happy to announce (only two weeks late) the birth of our daughter, Deena Jenny, on July 3. She's already got me wrapped around her finger. Unfortunately, this may cut into the vast amounts of time I've been devoting to the LyX coding effort for the past year . -Amir
Re: Improved latex preamble import in reLyX.
On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 08:26:21PM +0300, Dekel Tsur wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 10:34:05PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 03:03:40PM +0200, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> > >
>
> 3. The \L and \R commands for Hebrew files.
> - \L{text} is a shortcut to \foreignlanguage{english}{text}
> - \R{text} is a shortcut to \foreignlanguage{hebrew}{text}
But \L and \R may mean different things in non-Hebrew files, right?
-Amir
reLyX
Yes, I'm still alive. Jose, it's great to see that you made progress on the reLyX stuff. I took a brief look at it and it looked fine, although I might have done a couple things differently. Unfortunately, I don't have much free time, or I could try to help with the uninstalled reLyX problem. Still, it was nice to see a file in reLyX/ updated more recently than 2 years ago. -Amir
Re: reLyX
On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 09:14:34AM -0700, Kayvan A. Sylvan wrote: > On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 03:54:27PM +0200, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > > > I wonder how much mathed specific code is in reLyX that could be removed > > if we had support for it in mathed. > > > > I think I could e.g. support everything on the bottom of > > lib/reLyX/syntax.default "natively", so this reLyXmt thingy could go... > > > > Who knows how reLyX works nowadays? > > I do (or I can figure it out in a few minutes). > I do too (or I can figure it out in a few mintues). The more you support the better. The goal was always for reLyX to just copy math verbatim & pass it along to LyX, but LyX didn't support everything people were throwing at it. (This is still a problem for optional arguments to \section et al., but I've complained about that at least once in the last six months, so I won't be annoying.) -Amir
Re: Rename 666 to TEX
On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 10:23:53AM -0300, Garst R. Reese wrote: > Herbert Voss wrote: > > > > "Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen" wrote: > > > > > > The 666 name is fun, but not very intuitive/informative. What about > > > changing it to TEX? Failing that, we should at least use ERT, which > > > is not very intuitive either, but at least more established? > > > > TeX is better, because it's no more like the eval red text. > It goes away anyway. I like the 666, maybe the same people trying to ban > Harry Potter will give lyx some publicity also :) Funny, but I"m going to have to agree with the others. If someone does happen to see an open 666 inset, this'll give them a clue as to what it does. -Amir
Re: Rename 666 to TEX
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 03:41:35PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, Kayvan A. Sylvan wrote: > > > The "TeX inset" on the other hand, is clear and intuitive. > > In a DocBook document "TeX" won't make much sense. Whoa. Never thought of that. In my mind, the LyX backend is always LaTeX. > On the other hand "Raw" may make more sense when used in both LaTeX and > DocBook documents. Probably a good description. > You could also just call it a "Markup" inset since > LaTeX and DocBook are markup languages. To me, though, markup seems like it's even more marked up than LyX, not more raw. I'd go with raw. -Amir
Re: Artwork
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 03:32:48PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > > This is sexy but what would be really nice is if the logo actually looked > like something. The LyX creature is usually described as a deformed > platypus. It'd be nice it actually looked like it could be a real > creature -- with a beak that isn't just a cariciture. IMO, the LyX mascot looks like the LyX mascot. Animals, as Kayvan said, have been done. -Amir
Re: reLyX
On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 04:32:44PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote: > On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 05:39:43PM -0400, Amir Karger wrote: > > > Unfortunately, I don't have much free time, or I could > > try to help with the uninstalled reLyX problem. > > I have already a solution for that, I will commit it when I come back. Great! > I will extend your previous code in the $maybe_dir. I will locate the path > to the reLyX script and from there I will try to discover where is the > main_script located. Only some more lines of code... That sounds right. I'm sort of surprised I didn't do it in the first place. > If you see something that isn't the perlish way of doing it please say. I think I saw a couple things, but they didn't look too egregious. I think I would have solved differently the paperoptions stuff where you return subrefs, but it still seems OK. > At a certain point I was looking for the first char in a line and I was > doing something like: > > $_[0] eq '#', while the more natural way to do it in perl is /^\#/ $_[0] is wrong anyway, since that looks at the first scalar in @_, which is very different than the first character in $_! Yet another way to do it (recall that the Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it" is substr($_,1,1) eq '#'. I think I usually use the regex, though. Enjoy your vacation. -Amir
Re: lyx file format changes
On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 09:21:51AM +1200, Michael Koziarski wrote:
>
> >The conversion is important.
> >Perhaps the problem is that there aren't many developers which know perl well.
>
> Um, I do. I program perl & python for a living. Is there a bug / feature
> request for reLyx anywhere? I could have a poke around and see what I can
> do.
Aha! Caught you!
There are some bugs mentioned in the reLyX man page. There's also a BUGS
file in lib/reLyX in the distribution. Since then, there have been several
gazillion messages about it, some of which I might be able to forward to
you.
Near the beginning of this thread, Dekel gave a list of new LyX features that
aren't supported by reLyX yet. You might want to play with some of those
too. Also talk to Andre about what Mathed now supports or doesn't -- you may
be able to get rid of the reLyXmt{} in syntax.defaults. (Actually, you
shouldn't get rid of it, since people might want to put their own personal
commands in there that aren't supported by Mathed. But he may have added
support for what's there currently.)
There are actually several *classes* of reLyX problems:
- new LyX features, as above
- things not supported by reLyX guts: Text::TeX (which is very very old and
I changed only a bit from the v0.01 I got from CPAN) doesn't support
anything very complicated in [], for example, which means you can lose
stuff.
- LaTeX things LyX can't do: my favorite example is \section[foo]{bar},
which is supposedly going to be supported someday.
- Things that are difficult to translate exactly into LyX. I think there
have been a couple of threads on the difficulties of \centering vs.
\begin{center}, for example.
- ... much much more
Seriously, if you poke around a bit and decide it' s not totally hopeless,
I could go through my mail/relyx folder and find you a bunch more. I would
be thrilled to know someone's taken over for my slacking, and a bunch of the
hardcore LaTeXers on the list would be happy too.
-Amir
Re: new (math) parser
On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 01:15:47PM +0200, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > My first shot at a 'more LaTeX compliant' parser attached. Would be nice if > someone could test it against .lyx documents as well as "other" LaTeX (cut > & paste to the main LyX window, press C-m) Wow! The fact that you have this, btw, implies that it should be (relatively) easy to have the same functionality for pasting LaTeX into LyX. Just call reLyX -p on the text that's pasted. (How long has that been on the TODO list for?) -Amir
Re: Wheel mouse
On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 05:12:43PM +0200, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > just in case you have a wheel mouse, could you please check why the cursor > > "hangs" in the math formula? > > I don't have one. In case it's relevant and not reported yet, I believe I found that in LyX1.1.6fix2, if the mouse is over a fig, then the mouse wheel doesn't work. (This might only be when the fig takes up the whole window, but I don't think so.) -Amir
Re: web page changes
On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 08:59:05AM -0400, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote: > On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 09:25:39AM +0200, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote: > > Juergen Vigna <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > | However I don't care how this is output on the web-page (we could maybe > > | have a look at the prefered language set in the browser and have a list > > | of date-formats and output it in the local (prefered language) mode ;) > > > > No, we should use the language of the web page. > > > > And that is _ENGLISH_ -- not "American". > And in England people write 3rd August 2001. I can't tell if this is a joke. While Americans don't get a monopoly on the web, there's no reason to say that we should use British spellings & standards either. I'd vote for the "international standard" too, FWIW. -Amir
Re: Table of Contents dialog inconsistency
On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 03:49:40PM +0100, John Levon wrote: > > well known bug (it's on sourceforge) The best part of this message is that it came in the digest right after Jurgen said, "We can always count on Lars being stubborn." Scanning the messages, I saw his, then yours, and thought, "Lars' stubbornness is on sourceforge? Wow, it really is the source for all possible projects." -Amir
Re: reLyX bug
On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 06:42:11PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:28:53PM +0200, Michael Schmitt wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> >
> > syntax error at /home/schmitt/LyX/lyx-devel/lib/reLyX/MakePreamble.pm line
> > 310, near "}("
>
> This is my code.
> Amir could have a look and teel me why there is a syntax error there? The
> context of that line is:
>
> 305 if( $Latex_Preamble =~ /\\geometry\{(.*)\}/) {
> 306 my $geom_options = $1;
> 307 my $op;
> 308 foreach $op (keys %Geometry_Options) {
> 309 $geom_options =~ s/$op// && do {
> 310 $LyX_Preamble .= $Geometry_Options{$op}();
I'm pretty sure that the problem here is that you're missing a &.
I think you have to write:
$LyX_Preamble .= &{$Geometry_Options{$op}}();
That is, $Geometry_Options{$op} is a reference to a subroutine, so you need
to &{...}() it to actually call the subroutine.
> 311 print "Geometry option $op\n" if $debug_on;
> 312 }
> 313 }
> ...
>
> I'm using perl 5.6.0 and I don't have a problem with it, while Michael is
> using perl 5.004 or 5.005, I can't decide from the @INC...
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that 560 works on that. Could it be that if
you try to stringify a code reference, Perl calls the sub with no arguments?
Or maybe the parentheses make Perl realize it's a sub.
-Amir
Re: reLyX bug
On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 04:50:48PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 08:49:49AM -0400, Amir Karger wrote:
>
> > I'm pretty sure that the problem here is that you're missing a &.
> > I think you have to write:
> >
> > $LyX_Preamble .= &{$Geometry_Options{$op}}();
> >
> > That is, $Geometry_Options{$op} is a reference to a subroutine, so you need
> > to &{...}() it to actually call the subroutine.
>
> Or the other option from Yves, no?
> $Geometry_Options{$op}->()
Yeah, that's OK too.
> I only know some of the basics and it made lots of sense that if I define
> an annonomous function to call it only adding the parentheses, that is
> equivalent to prefixing it with an &.
Right. So it's just that Perl didn't have the sophisticated understanding of
$foo(bar) beforehand. (Of course, this opens up the possibility of bugs,
because I sometimes write $foo(bar) when I meant $foo[bar]. Leftover habit
from BASIC, I guess.)
-Amir
Re: reLyX bug
On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 11:30:32AM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote: > On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 05:18:49PM -0400, Amir Karger wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 04:50:48PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote: > > > On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 08:49:49AM -0400, Amir Karger wrote: > > > > > Yeah, that's OK too. > > Actually I have choosen your alternative, I really dislike the ()->, grrr... > (sorry Yves, nothing personal, on the other hand since today is friday it > is after all). Recall the Perl motto, "There's more than one way to do it." Although in this case, some ways are more confusing than others. > > Right. So it's just that Perl didn't have the sophisticated understanding of > > $foo(bar) beforehand. (Of course, this opens up the possibility of bugs, > > because I sometimes write $foo(bar) when I meant $foo[bar]. Leftover habit > > from BASIC, I guess.) > > I'm disapointed with you, you were my idol. Now all is lost, and nothing > makes sense. Thanks for this friday Amir, you destroyed my dreams to become > a great perl programmer. Well, if it makes you feel better, I recently finished my doctorate, and got a job at a bioinformatics company, where at least for the first four months I've been programming Perl full time. It's a lot of fun! Someone called me "Mr. Perl" the other day :) OTOH, don't tell anyone, but I may be learning Java soon. > PS: Even after your deeds, I have destroyed all the evidences that there > were times when you didn't remember to use push. Now even c++ has it... Thank you! Have a good weekend, even if you don't get to take Monday off like we lazy Americans do. -Amir
Re: reLyX bug
On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 10:45:16PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote: > On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 11:20:40PM +0200, Yves Bastide wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 07:17:38PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote: > > > [ignore unimportant stuff about a bug] > > > > I really, really prefer python. > > > > > > And the code is so much readble... > > > > But so much less fun... :-) > > Come on, that's not true. You can overload operators, use functional > programming tools as I did in my last program. If that is not fun, used with > classes I don't know what is. ;-) > > You can add a __cal__ method to a class making it a functor, and using it > everywhere a function can be used. I don't even dream it how to do it in > perl... ;-) I'm *not* trying to start a flame war here. I'll point out, though, that you can overload operators in perl too. I don't really know what you mean about using a clas where you would use a function. I will say there's a *lot* of sneakiness that can be done with Perl classes -- mostly because it's very relaxed about requiring things -- although much of that may be obfuscated. The AUTOLOAD method is downright scary, for example. I recently bought Damian Conway [the guy who has written modules to write Perl in Klingon, Latin, and whitespace, among other things]'s "Object-Oriented Perl", where he seems to be arguing "anything you can do in [OO language X] I can do in Perl if I feel like it, but usually I won't bother." Or something. (But not in a condescending way. I think he's just hitting back at all the people who say Perl isn't a "real" OO language.) > > And you know that Amir's code is particularly readable > > Why do you think that protesting I'm still hacking reLyX code? ;-) > No only readable but also clean. Thanks, *Mr* Perl. ;-) -Amir
JMarc? [was Re: reLyX bug]
On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 04:01:26PM +0200, Yves Bastide wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 02:22:56PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> >
> > As a curiosity, did reLyX worked before?
> > I guess that if it work then we had a strange case of interaction beetween
> > BLOCK and the variable outside. Hardly what anyone would expect.
>
> BEGIN blocks are executed immediately after compilation. Variable names
> are known, but assignments in "my" constructs haven't been done yet.
>
> With the previous version of reLyX, try
> $ perl -w reLyX-1.2
> you'll get
> Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at
> /usr/local/bin/reLyX-1.2 line 52.
>
> the uninitialized value being $mainscript...
Good point. I think you need to do
use vars qw($whatever @variables $you're_setting_in_the_BEGIN)
in the BEGIN block in order to get the vars to work. I might be wrong though
:)
> BTW (Amir I guess?) why
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> then
> $^W = 1; # same as 'perl -w'
>
> ? This disables -w in the BEGIN {}, as seen here
Good question. I don't know why we did that. My guess is that the configure
tool that writes the first line couldn't for some reason add the -w, so we
used ^W instead. However, this was all done 2 or 3 years ago, so I don't
remember.
In fact:
##
fermi2:~/lyx/reLyX>rlog -r1.5 reLyX.in
[snip]
File which configure turns into an executable wrapper for reLyX
revision 1.5
date: 1998/11/02 15:10:14; author: karger; state: Exp; lines: +3 -1
Use $^W instead of -w switch, because Jean-Marc asked me to.
###
Aha! JMarc, do you remember why we did this?
-Amir
Re: About latest reLyX
On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 01:20:18PM +0200, Andre Poenitz wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 12:17:06PM +0100, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> > Amir or John Weiss should have a better answer. I never worked with this
> > part of the code, but I think that I have a basic grasp of what is going on.
On the other hand, I haven't worked on it in three years.
> > Reading the comments in source code, it looks like the latex code is
> > "cleaned" in CleanTex.pm, where, for example, x^2 => x_{2}, since the mathed
> > parser is more strict than latex.
Pretty much.
> x^2 is fine in current mathed, and so is '$...$', '$$...$$' and '\cal'.
>
> > After that stage all the latex math code is passed untouched to mathed.
>
> Would be nice if all math remains untouched by reLyX...
It's great that you've done a lot of work to support the stuff lyx didn't
used to support which required writing these workarounds in the first place.
It seems like some of CleanTeX.pm could probably go away at this point.
I do think the math translation stuff in syntax.default needs to stay in,
because lots of people use non-"standard" math in their files, and this
might allow them to translate it.
Btw, the only problem with not translating $..$ and stuff is that the parser
at some point does need to make sure it knows where math begins and ends.
(Btw, there are probably other commands that automatically start math mode
text. Would be nice to handle those, sending them all to whatever that
function is that just copies exactly literally. As long as we're at it,
what's the current support for \mbox? I had this fantasy of finding \mbox'es
in math and translating them into regular LyX)
-Amir
Re: New chess (skak.sty) support
On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 08:37:28AM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > > P.S. Now, how about somebody implementing external material inset > > support for Rosegarden/NoteEdit and musicTex? That would make LyX the > > first word processor that supported writing really beautiful music. > > Check out http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/software/indexmt6.html > > Hmm, it seems like Lilypond might be a better choice for the generator. > See http://lilypond.org. I propose a NoteEdit/LilyPond combination. > Any takers? > I would *love* to work on this. I'm a music lover, and had a link to lilypond for years. Sadl, there's no way I have time for this. But it would be great if someone else would do it :) -Amir
Re: [Fwd: lyx utils]
On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 10:44:46AM -0400, Garst R. Reese wrote: > Herbert Voss wrote: > > > do we want to create a http://www.lyx.org/help/hollywood.html > > with all the information and files? > > > > Herbert > Hmm, I went to www.lyx.org and did not find /help so I tried > www.lyx.org/help and lo and behold :) Very nice. Every LyX user should > bookmark it. It would be nice to have the url on the LyX help menu. > Having mention of hollywood in /help would, I think, be a plus. The > python scripts are all fairly short. This is great! Any reason it's not linked from (a prominent place at) lyx.org? -Amir
Re: Translation of LaTeX to LyX comments and back
On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 05:08:31PM +, John Levon wrote: > On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 02:08:07AM -0500, Matej Cepl wrote: > > > I have again been urged to use vim for editing some > > document on my archaic notebook (where I use M$-DOS and vim) and > > I was against unpleasantly surprised, that LyX still does not > > provide interoperability between LyX and LaTeX in terms of > > comments. Do you think, that it would be really so hard to > > implement a translation of any LyX note (Insert/Note) into LaTeX > > comment (with %) and vice versa? It would make things hugely > > better for me. > > I suppose this would be utterly trivial to code, unless I'm missing > something ? Well, you have to be somewhat careful. You probably don't want to copy every "%whatever" as a LyX note. What about %'s that are put in to fix line breaks in TeX commands? You might want to check the archives, because I think we discussed this long ago. I know Lars had talked about using Comment style for this. There is a Comment style in LyX already, right? -Amir
Re: LDN & mascot
On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 10:58:42AM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote: > > > On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 10:26:21AM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > > > As for the contest I think we have had arguements on that earlier this > > > year and nobody wanted to change from the existing creature design. > > > The pretty anti-aliased version will be used soon enough but it is > > > still the same design. > > > > I love the present design, I only want a name for our pet. And no > > John, I don't think that he is called Steve. :-) > > I suppose one question we might want to answer first is: Is "it" a he, > she or an it? Do we care? I guess that -- although I have no particular liking for the name, I'd have to go for "Felix" (Felyx?). Or Alyx. -Amir
Re: --export cleanup
On Mon, Dec 06, 1999 at 09:38:07AM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > After all, it implements a FreqUently Requested Feature (FURF). I believe you mean "Frequently User-Requested Feature" (FURF). -Amir
Re: Intuitive views of nesting -- conglomerate
On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 02:22:46PM +, Duncan Simpson wrote: > > BTW A really good description of .lyx format, particuilarly in the table > area, would propel a .lyx word2x output stage higher up the word2x TODO > list. I don't know what your experience with Perl is, but you might find the RelyxTable.pm file that's part of reLyX to be useful. Specifically, take a look at the comment blocks that describe the various fields, which are found right before the "new" subroutines. And look at the "print" subroutines as well. Basically, a lyx table first prints out a few table-wide flags. Then it prints out information about each row (e.g. whether there's a line at the top of the row), then about each column (e.g. left/right/center alignment), then about each cell. Finally, each cell is printed out, separated by the string "\n\\newline \n". As far as the overall description, you might find it easiest just to look at a couple lyx files. The format is really pretty simple. Basically, \ at the beginning of a line starts most of the non-plain-text commands. Many commands look like \begin_inset Figure followed by various flags. Again, depending on how happy you are with Perl, looking at reLyX files may be easier than reading the lyx source, because the output is (I think) spread out amongst a number of files. Or maybe I'm just trying to get someone to read the reLyX source. The good or bad news is that (I think) the lyx file format will be changing in the not too distant future. -Amir
Re: Intuitive views of nesting -- conglomerate
(Duncan tried to get me to claim responsibility for my answer by addressing a mail privately to me. I won't fall for it! People with a clue are invited to respond.) On Mon, Dec 13, 1999 at 09:54:38PM +, Duncan Simpson wrote: > [re changes in the LyX file format] > > Are the changes drastic enough that I would need to rewrite the output stage > from stratch or would it be just twiddling a few strings? Rough how soon is > soon? (I really have plenty of other items on the wish list that I could do > while the .lyx format is unstable). > If you look at the Roadmap at devel.lyx.org, you'll see that the file format change isn't listed as a goal for either 1.4 or 1.5. This puts a lower limit of, let's say, a month on the change, with an upper limit somewhere around infinity. I suspect it will be somewhere in the middle :) It's basically a question of whether the people clamoring for GUI independence will win over those clamoring for XML or whatever. In any case, I think the changes wouldn't be too drastic. For example, the Tasks page says: - Enhance the LyX fileformat. Make it reflect the buffer structure a bit better, get rid of unneeded blank lines and spaces. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? The last time I remember lars talking about it, he wanted to make it a bit more like html (xml?) where you'd have begins and ends, not just begins, and perhaps better structuring for nesting. But that was months, perhaps a year ago. It's obviously not a very high priority, although as I mentioned there are some people clamoring for XML now, and I don't know if that would change matters. The other issue is that the change in file format might reflect the change in buffer structure, which I don't know when that's planned for. To sum up, word2lyx is probably one of the most common FAQ/requests we get, since new users are almost always coming from the Word universe (and will be for the foreseeable future). So I think a lot of people would be happy with word2lyx, and if the lyxers do change their format, it'll be up to them to let you know about the changes. (In any case, I have to imagine they'll keep the file format backward compatible, so it would be OK though not optimal if word2lyx were still writing the old format.) -Amir
Re: Hebrew support for LyX
On Tue, Dec 14, 1999 at 01:19:23PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > Yes, this patch is very cool. Hebrew support can be considered a FURF, > and it's great to see somebody do something about it. Yay! Dekel, how is this patch related to TeX--XeT? I seem to remember you needed more than just a Hebrew font to write hebrew in LaTeX. > After all, how common is it to write a mixed document? Actually, I suspect it's not uncommon. First, in the scientific world (a popular LyX niche) I think there's stuff you have to write in English, even if you want to write most of a document in hebrew. ALternatively, a lot of science in Israel is done in English, but folks might want to put some hebrew stuff in. But of course, limited support for hebrew is better than none. In addition, most of the Jews in the world don't live in Israel. But very often when Jews are discussing religious stuff they want to use Hebrew (getting hebrew on web pages is a popular FAQ), in combination with a mainly English (Spanish, French...) document. Heck, with multi-column (or something like it) you could even write a bible translation! LyX would be really great for this. btw, do we get arabic for free with this? Arabic is an URF, if not a FURF. > Furthermore, this is our only change to get Hebrew support: None of the > existing developers have any expertise in Hebrew, I'm offended! Oh, you mean expertise in coding a Hebrew document processor. OK. (Well, OK, I'm not really an active developer these days, but don't tell anyone.) -Amir
Re: postscripts
On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 03:50:18PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On Tue, 9 Nov 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, Kayvan A. Sylvan wrote: > > > [From Amir] > > > > Is *anyone* working on (english) docs right now? > > > > > > Good question. > > > > I've got a few minor mods, but the real world has been a bit too intrusive > > lately. I've been trying to keep a TODO list, and better letter > > documentation will be added to it, but I've lost track of many of the new > > features lately (like all the tth stuff ...). At some point, we're going > > to have to give this thing a real kickstart. > > Perhaps you could give Amir a copy of the documentation TODO list to put > on the web. We might be able to get a couple of users to draft small > sections. Hm. I suppose I saved this mail for a reason. Mike, d'you want to send that to me? Of course, it would get lost in tasks.php3, and I don't know where else to put it, but maybe we could figure something out. Actually, we probably ought to have a whole separate doc.php3 page that describes the documentation effort and the fact that it could really use some input! The TODO could be at the bottom of it. If someone sends me a TODO, there's a teensy chance I'll have the energy to write it. Alternatively, if someone sends me a whole page, I can check it in :) I'm even willing to convert HTML (or text!) to PHP3 if you'd like. How magnanimous of me. -Amir
Re: Compilers, exceptions, code size, etc. [was: Re: Cannot compile Lyx
On Thu, Dec 23, 1999 at 02:21:11PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On 22 Dec 1999, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote: > > > And this is why it takes lyx two hours to compile on the new stdlib++, > > 1 hour of that time is lyxfunc... > > > > reducing function size will speed up compilation time a lot. > > So you'd like to ditch the giant switch statement and replace it with a > function table instead? A vector indexed by function number or a hash_map > perhaps? This is easy enough to implement. > > Actually, didn't Amir suggest something wonderful using a bunch of > separate functions last year? Where we could include the function pointer > and it's arguements in the undo/redo stack? Hmmm... I'll have to check my > archive. Me?! I know you're in a different time zone, but I can't imagine it's Friday there already. Why would I suggest something about the core C++ code? Or did you mean the other Amir? -Amir
Re: 1999 timeline
On Thu, Dec 23, 1999 at 01:01:46PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > Just want to point out that we feature in the LWN timeline > for 1999 of important events with the release of LyX 1.0.0: > > http://lwn.net/1999/features/Timeline/?month=feb Notice how few applications whose releases they list. I tend to think LyX has a (relatively) small user base because there's only a few hundred people getting lyx-users, but obviously the LWN folks realize that LyX is important. > I think 1999 was a very interesting year for LyX. We released > 1.0.0 after a long time in the making, It seems like only yesterday we were wondering when 1.0 would ever come out. > had a succesful developers meeting in Italy, wrote a new kernel (even if it didn't get used) > succesfully changed the development model, and gained substantial momentum > in development It's really nice to see lots of traffic on lyx-devel (including not only the usual feature requests and reLyX bug reports, but also core developers discussing how to change code) as well as lots of CVS checkins! > after a somewhat slow 1998. Yeah. All that happened in 1998 was that some program called reLyX went from vaporware to release. (It's Friday in Europe already!) > Also, we had an enormous boom in the translation effort, and all in > all 1999 was a huge succes in the area of internationalization. I agree. As of December '98, I think German and Swedish were the only doc translations (swedish tutorial was checked in 12/23/98). We now have the tutorial translated into 9 languages, and there are (at least) 9 other languages that have begun translation efforts! Hm. There were a lot of exclamation points in this email. But I think we don't pat ourselves on the back nearly often enough! Merry Christmas to those of you who believe in that sort of thing. I'm assuming all you devvies will be coding furiously during your vacations---let's see some more patches and checkins! -Amir
Re: multibyte support for lyx
On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 04:44:54PM +0900, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I would like to report that Korean as well as Japanese support for the > lyx-1.1.3 is now possible. The binary package in the rpm format and the > source package in the compressed atr format are available at > ftp://stone.phys.pusan.ac.kr/pub/lyx-kr. Someone who's got free time on their hands might want to post this on www.lyx.org/download/index.php3. And devel.lyx.org probably ought to mention Asian languages in the translation page (which is getting too long already, but that's life). It's not really fair that all we mention is Western languages. It wouldn't hurt to mention somewhere that we're moving to Unicode (we still are, right?) and that Hebrew is (?) working in 1.1 too. -Amir
Re: a bug and a suggestion
On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 02:32:15PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > "Norbert" == Norbert Scheu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Norbert> Hi everybody, here are a few suggestions: > > Hi, > > Norbert> it would be less dangerous if the > Norbert> command reLyX file.tex yielded the file ''file-re.lyx'' > Norbert> instead of ''file.lyx'' as the latter name might collide with > Norbert> other files. True. Of course, that's why reLyX won't run if file.lyx exists. > Norbert> In my opinion, a clear distinction > Norbert> between hand-written and automatically generated files is > Norbert> preferable. > > The right solution is to present the user a Save As... popup when > exporting. This would not be very difficult, but AFAIK nobody is > working on it currently. If I remember correctly, we had a discussion about this. The problem is that everyone has different ideas about what sort of names to give them. What if a person already has 'file-re.lyx'? I think for a while I was talking about using truly random names, sort of like the names that lyx uses for its temp directories. Or, say, file.2354.lyx, where 2354 is the process number of the reLyX run. I don't remember whether I didn't do it because I'm lazy or because there are good reasons not to do it, but there's probably mail about it in the archive somewhere. I think the best solution for exporting is JMarc's, and it ought to be applied to importing as well. (After all, you have to choose the name of a file when you do a 'New' or 'New from Template' so why not when you do a 'New from LaTeX'?) And while you're at it, one could create a more sophisticated importing popup too. I think this was on the agenda at some point but never got worked on. The more sophisticated popup could allow you to choose a name for the imported file. (Or just use the New popup, i.e. make it more like the New from Template command?) In addition (and this was the original reason for the popup), the popup could allow you to use the various options to reLyX without running it from the command line. The popup could be arbitrarily complicated. For example: - a combobox to choose the text class for the imported document (which would implement the -c option, with the advantage that it would only call the option with known textclasses). -a text input area to input "regular" environments (-r option). - A file selector to choose extra syntax files (-s) - check boxes for -f and -p options - -d option (you'd have to put the debug information somewhere) Too bad I'm not a LyX coder, or I could actually do this. -Amir
Re: web site mirrors?
On Tue, Feb 02, 1999 at 01:59:42PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Amir Karger wrote: > > > Did anyone think to make a list of the sites that offered to create mirrors > > for us or do we need to search through the archives? > > I have copies of all the emailed offers I received. > Of course there are also the various existing ftp mirror sites that may > also be prepared to provide web mirroring. Hey Allan, remember this? Are you or anyone else interested in expanding our mirrorage? (I've had this mail sitting in my box for almost a year now, as you can see.) -Amir
Re: Popups/Layouts
On Thu, Jan 06, 2000 at 01:54:10PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > "Jose" == Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Jose> No related but... the major difficulty in importing docbook in > Jose> lyx is the absence of a library to write the lyx format. Only > Jose> the idea of writing lyx format without help scares. I have done > Jose> this before with sgml2lyx, but I have lost the courage since > Jose> then... ;) > > This would indeed be a Good Thing. I wonder how difficult it would be > to isolate the code which writes lyx files in a separate class. One > solution is to create the document in LyX (assuming your import > function is part of LyX) and then wirte it out. > > Now, if you want to do this in perl, for example, you will have to get > some stuff from reLyX. Amir, how difficult would it be to create a > stand alone .lyx writer? > I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. I suspect the answer would be "pretty difficult", because reLyX is I think pretty dependent on the input being LaTeX. For example, there are places where the code says, "now just write whatever text was in that argument, since the LaTeX and LyX styles are similar." I suspect what you're talking about---although I invite clarification---is something more like RelyxFigure and RelyxTable, which are OO modules to store LyX figures and tables. I guess those two modules really have .lyx writers in them (although neither can handle all LyX features, or LaTeX of course). The rest of the code is mostly a huge switch statement that says if you get this kind of command, then write it out this way, so it might be hard to isolate a .lyx writer from it. Not harder than starting from scratch, probably, but hard. But couldn't you also start with sgml2lyx? -Amir
Re: Popups/Layouts
On Thu, Jan 06, 2000 at 08:37:31PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > Actually, why at the beginning LyX didn't write LaTeX directly but had > > its own LyX format? I suppose that's because LaTeX is too complicated to > > parse, right? > [lots of erudite discussion snipped] > The better solution is the current one: With reLyX, you > are more willing to accept that not everything is readable, Although not so willing that you refrain from sending in bug reports. > and also, since Perl is a better text processor than C++, I thought Perl was a good-for-nothing write-only snail-speed language! > it's highly likely that reLyX does a better job than a > C++ parser developed in the same time frame. Well, my brother's a CS professor. When I was bragging at him about how reLyX worked so well, as long as you didn't use plain TeX, or interesting LaTeX commands, or unsupported packages (i.e., all of them), he said, "why don't you just use the parser in LaTeX, which is guaranteed to understand LaTeX?" The best answer I could come up with was, "because I've already spent a year working on reLyx." It's possible that starting from that parser, you could have developed something better in a year. But who knows? > There are other reasons as well, including the difficultly > of implementing a capable LaTeX parser, but we had a very huge > discussion about exactly this issue a year or two ago, when we > discussed whether we should move to a format which is a subset > of LaTeX. > At that point, the conclusion was that it would be a mistake, > and I see nothing that changes this conclusion. In fact, the way I remember it is that there was a huge ongoing discussion, and the plan was to do it eventually. Then reLyX appeared, and the core LyXers decided it wasn't worth changing the whole parser since reLyX worked, albeit not very well at that point. So partly the decision was made due to circumstance. -Amir
Re: Popups/Layouts
On Fri, Jan 07, 2000 at 02:49:56PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > What I mean is that, there could be functions to handle a font stack > and output the right lyx commands. Or to say 'set layout to 'foo'. Or > to parse the .layout files and put relevant info in a data structure. > Or to build a table. > > I'm sure a lot of code in reLyX could be used somewhere else. Of > course, it may be a lot of work to factor out this code. I agree that a lot of it could be used. RelyxFigure, RelyxTable, and the layout stuff could mostly be taken whole. Unfortunately, (1) as I mentioned in a previous email, a lot of the code is in a huge switch statement where for each command, that command's format is changed to LyX format, which means you'd have to hunt through BasicLyX.pm line by line looking for print statements. (2) LyX often writes things very similar to LaTeX. So when you're translating from LaTeX, your job is easier. I.e. you don't have to build up any OO to store stuff, you just copy text verbatim from the LaTeX. (This is most obvious in math, but happens elsewhere, too, e.g. for arguments to commands.) Happy Friday. -Amir
Re: LyX CVS access problem
On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 02:49:30PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Kayvan A. Sylvan wrote: > > > I am using the exact same settings I have always used: > > So am I... > > > > [kayvan@satyr ~/src/lyx]$ cvs update Fatal error, aborting. anoncvs: > > no such user cvs [update aborted]: authorization failed: server > > anoncvs.lyx.org rejected access [kayvan@satyr ~/src/lyx]$ > > > > Can someone help? > > Or in my case: > > using ssh2 and cvs update Just as a data point, I checked in the new translation yesterday using ssh 1.2.26. -Amir
Re: Support for Arabic writing
On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 11:02:06AM +0800, Luqman Hakim wrote: > > Is there any support for Arabic writing in Lyx ? > I know there are ArabTeX for writing Arabic with LaTeX command. > but, could it be used with Lyx ? > A patch was just submitted this week to allow hebrew, which is also right-to-left. I suspect it won't be too hard to add Arabic support. -Amir
Re: Embedded notes not getting emitted into generated LaTeX
On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 11:55:08PM -0500, Mark Coletti wrote: > [bug snipped -- I don't know from coding] > Also, the web site mentions this mailing list, but doesn't give > subscription instructions. Could someone please send them to me? (And, > natch, fix the web site.) http://www.lyx.org/internet/mailing.php3 has extensive directions. By "the web site" do you mean devel.lyx.org? -Amir Karger
Re: lyx-1.1.4pre2 installation bug report (I think)
On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 06:26:49PM +0100, Abdelrazak YOUNEs wrote: > > > > PS: does .ne stand for Niger? [That's what I guessed from EAMAC home > > page] We did not have that many users from Africa until now. Welcome! > > Yes indeed, we're based in Niamey, EAMAC is the African School for > Meteorology and Civil Aviation. Our school have students from a lot of > West African countries and I'm trying to influence them so that they use > Lyx instead of word. Great! (Welcome) Someone has to find the paragraph in the web site or docs that talks about a development effort on five continents and change it to six. (Actually counter.li.org says there are a couple linux hosts in antarctica---anyone know if they use lyx?) -Amir
Re: lyx-1.1.4pre2 installation bug report (I think)
On Wed, Jan 26, 2000 at 10:10:18AM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > Abdel> PS: Y'a t'il une version française du site??? > > Non, malheureusement. Il y a un site sur la traduction en francais de > la documentation (un peu au point mort en ce moment...), mais c'est > tout. Well, that's pretty lame, even if you're trying to hide it by writing it in french. Could you perhaps convince one of the french translators to write up a quick web page in french? They don't have to write too much, since the docs cover how to actually use LyX and they're (in the process of being) translated already. It would just have to describe the simple aspects of setting up french LyX. (Which means you could probably copy the mexican mirror's spanish page and translate it to french.) -Amir
Re: CVS newbie question
On Fri, Jan 28, 2000 at 10:12:36AM +, Angus Leeming wrote: > The documentation on "Getting source code with CVS" at > www.devel.lyx.org/cvs.php3 is very clear and easy to > follow. thank you! > Having logged on with: > > cvs login > > and checked out or updated the source, shouldn't I logout > with: > > cvs logout In fact, there's no such command. -Amir
Re: LyX CVS access problem
On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 05:02:34AM +0100, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote: > > Note all listeners: > There are room for plenty people so this is almost a general > invitation. However it would be nice if you had some interest in LyX > internals and contributing some code... What if we just want to drink Norwegian beer? -Amir
Re: Bug in math editor using emacs-style key bindings
On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 10:27:16AM +, Angus Leeming wrote: > > Can somebody please explain to me why the Esc button exits me from math-editor > mode. I know it's meant to, I've read the documentation. What I can't > understand is why this is a Good Thing. The functionality is already > provided by either the arrow keys (to scroll out of the math-box), or the mouse > button (to click out). Because if you're in the middle of the math expression (e.g. editing something), then arrow doesn't scroll out, and the mouse is very far away. In fact, it's significantly easier to hit Esc (especially for vi users!) than to move to the right arrow key. > Could I request that this feature be removed so that emacs-style bindings are > useable. Please, please, please. But what about all the people who don't use emacs bindings? -Amir
Re: LyX CVS access problem
On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 03:58:29PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > What if we just want to drink Norwegian beer? > > I'm sure Lgb can find a way to exempt in this case. > Be warned though, beer is NOT cheap in Norway. Can't we make it a free weekend by borrowing in advance from the money we're going to make on the IPO of LyX, Inc.? -Amir
Re: LyX CVS access problem
On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 04:08:52PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > > What we could try is to get sponsoring from some open-sourcish firm. > > Lgb, maybe you could ask Matthias if Troll Tech could donate a bit of > cash, and we would pay back by paving the way for the Qt port of LyX? > I'm going to be pretty annoyed if you're successful, since I can't go anyway. Lars, if you do this, make sure you don't tell them the money's really just to buy expensive Norwegian beer. -Amir
NLDM
On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 01:31:35PM -0600, Dr. Ing. Roland Krause wrote: [lots of useful and intelligent discussion of LyX snipped] > > Remember that we still have the LyX developers meetings to give the > > program the huge bursts that any open source project needs from time > > to time. At those meetings we suddenly have the resources to make huge > > steps and succeed with them. But let us save the big ammo to those > > meetings. > > Hmmm, I was not aware that you guys did actual work at this meetings :-) > He he wish I could participate - maybe if you'd all come to the US. We don't need any foreigners! We could just have a National LDM ourselves! Of course, none of us actually know the LyX core well enough to get anything done, but we could certainly get together and drink cheap American beer! -Amir
Re: ANNOUNCE: italian lyx-user-web site
On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 10:27:08AM +0100, Juergen Vigna wrote: > > I'm happy to announce that the LyX-User-Web has already partially been > translated to italian BY Claudio Coco! > > You may try it out on: http://www.it.lyx.org/it Great! I'll mention it on the lyx.org i18n page. Incidentally, www.it.lyx.org doesn't actually mention the /it pages on its home page, because it mirrors from www.lyx.org which doesn't. Do you think we could build a php3 thing which linked to the page if it existed? Or how about we could include a file like "preface.php3" which ---if it exists--- is put somewhere near the top of a page if it exists. Then Jurgen just has to put "Try LyX in Italian" (and/or an italian translation thereof) wherever he mirrors the lyx web site to. Would this work? -Amir
Re: NLDM
On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 10:51:18AM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > > There's always documentation, reLyX, new layouts, watching Babylon5 on > video, reLyX, documentation and last but not least documentation. > > So you see there is something you could do after all ;-) Right. Then there's also documentation. But you're forgetting my incurable laziness. Oh, also my thesis. -Amir
Thesis!
So I've been complaining about my thesis pretty much ever since my early
messages to the lyx list. (E.g., "It'll probably take me forever to write my
thesis since I'm wasting time with things like reLyX.") Well, it's getting
to the end, so I'm officially going into "waste less time" mode. It remains
to be seen whether this works at all, but one of my brilliant plans is to
cut down on email. As such, I just unsubscribed from the LyX devel list and
users list.
Right after I did that, I wimped out and *resubscribed* to the devel-digest.
Hopefully that'll be safe since I'll only get mail once in a while, so I'll
be less tempted to respond to every email. Anyway, I'm too addicted to quit
cold turkey.
This means my insta-replies ("just add water!") will be no longer, which I
suppose will let some of the rest of you get more work done. If there's
anything reLyX related that seems important enough not to wait until I get
the digest, go ahead and CC it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JMarc, could you CC any
bug reports to me that aren't already CC'ed?)
I'm still on lyx-announce, lyx-doc, lyx-devel-digest, cvslog, and wwwlog
(wow!), so I probably won't completely disappear from the
community (at least until the last couple weeks before my defense). If you
still see me writing lots of email, you should tell me to stop wasting time
and get back to my thesis :)
Wish me luck, and hopefully I'll resume my long-winded responses to pretty
much everything once I'm a doctor and have a real job.
-Amir
ps you see? I can't even write a short email to write I won't be writing
email any more!
revtex4
I know a couple of people showed interest in the new revtex4 layout, which supports the American Physical Society's new RevTeX 4. Unfortunately (see previous emails) I haven't got time to fix it, but I note that they're now up to beta 3, and have fixed some things (for example, a typo in one of the command names!) It would be great if someone could update the revtex4.layout file to work with beta 3. APS is going to switch officially to RevTeX 4 soon (for certain definitions of soon), and I think they'll be making a big push to have more authors write papers using it. It's entirely possible that they would recommend LyX to their authors if it worked well, which could lead to a big jump in the user base (and can IEEE, AAS, et al. be far behind?). As Mike R. said, I think better \cite support is about the only thing missing. -Amir
Re: reLyX
On Tue, Feb 22, 2000 at 04:45:11PM +0100, Michael Creel wrote: > >Hello, I hope you're the person to report this to - I found your email >in the reLyX readme. Well, I kind of am. See below. > I've been using reLyX to convert TeX files originally created with > Scientific Workplace (a Windows graphical TeX (sort of) processor). It > sometimes works without a hitch, but sometimes crashes. I found that > Scientific Workplace sometimes writes $...math... $$...math...$ where it > should write $...math...$, and the $$ causes reLyX to crash. The solution > is to replace $$ with a space. Then reLyX works fine. I thought that the > reLyX scripts could incorporate this change to make it automatic. Of > course, the fault is with Scientific Workplace, but maybe it would be > useful to deal with it in reLyX if the change doesn't break anything. There's bad news and bad news. The first bad news is that I looked at the code and it wouldn't be very easy to fix. Why? Well, the first pass of reLyX, aka CleanTeX, replaces $foo$ with \(foo\) and $$blah$$ with \[blah\]. The obvious solution would be to tell CleanTeX that if it reads $$ and it's inside a $, it should write out nothing instead of \[. That would be easy to do. However, the Text::TeX parser used by CleanTeX (and other parts of reLyX) reads a token at a time, and keeps track of when it's nested inside brackets or other commands. So even if we told CleanTeX to print out nothing, the parser would still think that the entire rest of the tex file was nested inside a \[ math equation. This part would be harder to fix. Although the half-fix might stop reLyX from actually crashing. The second bad news is that I'm trying to finish my PhD thesis right now, so I'm not really working on reLyX at all. Unfortunately, noone else is either, even though there are a number of bugs to be fixed and new features that could be added. (In fact, I think this Scientific Workplace bug or a similar one has been mentioned before.) I'm forwarding this to the lyx list on the off chance someone wants to work on it, but I suspect you're out of luck. So your best bet for now is just to use a simple perl script to fix things. For example perl -wpi -e 's/\$\$/ /g' foo.lyx will replace $$ in foo.lyx with a space. (The -i option to perl makes it edit foo.lyx itself, instead of using foo.lyx as input and outputting to stdout, for example.) This will only work if Scientific Workplace doesn't use $$ in its other meaning, of course. The main problem with (La)TeX is that there are many ways to do things, so different people come up with different ways to write the same thing, which makes reading them all very tough. So for example, I've never used $$, and I'd be happy to just get rid of the '$$' token, so that $$ would always be interpreted as two '$' tokens next to each other. But other people may use $$ all the time, and they'd be pretty unhappy if I "broke" reLyX by making this fix. -Amir Karger
Re: reLyX
On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 04:39:08PM +0100, Michael Creel wrote:
>
>Rather than modify reLyX, maybe the best solution would to create a
>document that explains this sort thing so that people would know how to
>modify their TeX documents before applying reLyX. I only found my
>solution after a lot of trial and error, and was about to give up.
That's a great idea. It could also include some of the more popular reLyX
bugs and lacking features, like:
- macros like "\newcommand{\endl}{\end{list}}" will break
- a_b_c and $\bf foo$ don't work
I don't really know whether this sort of thing would best belong in the
reLyX man page, the current reLyX BUGS page, or the reLyX section of the
User's Guide (which is currently very small). The last seems like the place
most likely to be read by people who have a problem. The bad news, as I
mentioned before, is that I'm in thesis mode, so I'm not going to do it.
-Amir
Re: reLyX
On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 05:42:51PM +0100, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > reLyX man page, the current reLyX BUGS page, or the reLyX section of the > > User's Guide (which is currently very small). The last seems like the place > > most likely to be read by people who have a problem. The bad news, as I > > I think, the man page is a better place. That's the place where I'd look > for this kind of information... > Except that I suspect that 99% of LyX users never read the reLyX man page. Note that most people are now going to use reLyX with the "Import LaTeX" functionality. (And if anyone ever implements a more sophisticated Import LaTeX, then even more people would use it, hint hint.) Many won't even know it's a separate program, let alone that it has a man page. -Amir
Re: reLyX
On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 06:08:07PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > >>>>> "Amir" == Amir Karger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Then the man page should be turned into a manual, or better be > included in Extended.lyx in some form... We had talked about doing that. In fact, I even made some efforts to create a pod2lyx converter and generated a reLyX.lyx document out of the man page. For reasons I don't remember (folks with lots of time on their hands can check the mail archives from August '99.) we never included the .lyx doc in the docs or in Extended.lyx. I believe someone (Mike?) was talking about rewriting the docs for importing - I suppose the reLyX stuff could go wherever that does. > But of course, you do not > have time for that (no, do not insist, you do not). You folks are being so supportive! Although it seems like I spend all my time these days writing emails about how I don't have any time. The thesis isn't getting much longer... > It would be great if somebody could step up to replace Amir as reLyX > maintainer, since many small or large bugs have been accumulating. No kidding! (BTW, I think there are a couple very minor fixes sitting around that I never checked in.) I wouldn't hold my breath, Jean-Marc. I've been asking for help on reLyX for about two years now, but - while I've gotten tons of useful bug reports & feature requests for which I think people (especially JMarc) - I've never gotten any patches more than a few lines, and I've never gotten help for longer than it took to implement one feature. I apologize if my complaints sound bitter. I think I got overenthusiastic about the open source paradigm and forgot that: - reLyX is a tiny piece of a not-terribly-widely-used program (compared to, say, Apache :) - reLyX basically works so there's not a great need to add things. The amount of work required to get into the code may be greater than the reward you'd get out of it. (I would claim that you could work on a piece of reLyX without understanding the whole thing, but I"m not sure people would believe me) - the intersection of people who use LyX and know LaTeX and Perl seems to be rather small It's too bad though. I barely touched the code in 1999, but I felt like if I had just one person collaborating I would've been much more motivated to do so. At this point, due to the thesis, I would have to be an emeritus collaborator, though. (I have no idea what sort of time I'll have after the thesis, when I'm planning on entering the Real World (for some definitions of the Real World, most of which have little to do with MTV.)) > BTW: would it be easy for reLyX to ignore the \protect inserted by LyX? I don't know. How can reLyX tell that it's a \protect that LyX put in, and not one that the coder put in? -Amir
Re: reLyX
On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 05:16:26PM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> >>>>> "Amir" == Amir Karger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> Amir> That's a great idea. It could also include some of the more
> Amir> popular reLyX bugs and lacking features, like:
>
> Amir> - macros like "\newcommand{\endl}{\end{list}}" will break
>
> Amir> - a_b_c and $\bf foo$ don't work
>
> Is a_b_c really supposed to work? I thought not.
Huh?!
I just tried it, and you're right, I get a "Double subscript" error. And
yet, I must have put that bug into BUGS for a reason! Could it be that older
forms of latex don't mind it? It may be something slightly different than
a_b_c, but I definitely remember dealing with a file someone had sent me
with something closely related to that. Hm...
-Amir
Re: reLyX
On Wed, Mar 01, 2000 at 11:59:12AM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> > "Andre" == Andre Poenitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> Or decide that \protect should disappear in constructs like \protect\[
> and \protect\], since LyX should add them back. Can reLyX do it, or is
> it out of reach?
Um... I *think* it should be able to do that. Text::TeX can look ahead one
token, so you could have CleanTeX say that if lookAheadToken is
$,$$,\(,\[,\),\] then you should not print \protect. Since \protect takes no
arguments it won't confuse Text::TeX either. (Whereas the $foo$$bar$ bug
mentioned earlier *will* confuse it because the parser wants a $$ to match
the first, even if we tell CleanTeX to ignore it.)
You know, I thought the bug that wasn't a_b_c was translating a_\sqrt{b},
but it turns out reLyX can handle that just fine. So I wonder what the bug
was?! For now, I'm going to take that bug out of BUGS.
-Amir
Re: Asian languages support?
On Sat, Feb 12, 2000 at 08:10:36PM +0900, Bruno Raoult wrote: > > As I noticed that Lyx 1.1 should support asian languages, I tried t o > install it. Unfortunately, I cannot get it to work... Can you tell me if > Asian languages are already supported (in this case I have to check again > on my side), or, if not, when they will? > Hi, Bruno. I'm forwarding your mail to the LyX devel mailing list. I know very little about Asian languages in LyX (well, actually I know very little about Asian languages in general). I'm pretty sure that there is good support for several Asian languages, but I'll let the experts explain it to you. LyXers - is the LyX web site outdated with regard to Asian language support? Does it describe support correctly for 1.0 and 1.1? Does it have the patches and links including the recent one that superseded the old one? If not, could you post a quick summary to the list? Then I (or someone less lazy than me) can check in a fix to the website. -Amir
asian languages, cont.
OK, we've gotten a good answer from ChangGil Han. Is anyone willing to put some of that info on the web site? (Hint: I don't think I'll get to it any time soon.) Lars? JMarc? -Amir
LyX development news
Great idea allan! I think it would be nice to have something every month. Can't do it more often because there are two week periods where not much gets done, but I think most months have at least something major happening. You could send it to lyx-users (lyx-announce?) as well as lwn, because I suspect regular users wouldnt' mind hearing once a month about new stuff, especially if it's the feature they were waiting for. Of course, if a new release were coming out every month, it wouldnt' be a problem, but I don't think development is quite that fast, do you? -Amir ps John: I would respond to your mail, but I'm too busy working on my thesis. Quick roundup: I've started writing although I haven't exactly got all of my data yet; we may or may not have a date; I'm only somewhat freaking out. But it's amazing how much less email I'm getting.
Buckaroo
Allan queried: On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Juergen Vigna wrote: >> >> Just remember, wherever you go, there you are. >> -- Buckaroo Bonzai >Have you seen this movie? Did it make much sense to anyone? I saw it not >long after it came out (quite young then) and it didn't make a lot of >sense but had some quotable lines. > >Allan. (ARRae) Saw the movie. Didn't make sense but I thought it was hilarious. I *also* had the honor of meeting John Lithgow. I was in a chorus in college, & there was a big arts weekend & he emceed a concert at which we & others sang. Anyway, there was a reception afterwards, and I somehow got the guts to walk up to him & ask him a question. I guess I & a friend had recently seen it, so I brilliantly used my first & possibly last ever meeting with a Somebody to say something like, "so I loved BB. Um, what were you guys thinking while you filmed it?" or something like that. He said something like "you should ask my son about it." (His son was a student at Harvard at the time & I guess JL was trying to get rid of us politely.) The best part of BB is when they run through a room & see a watermelon with a bunch of probes & scientific stuff connected to it. One guy asks what it's for & the other guy says "I'll tell you later", only he never does. OK, pretty weird movie. -Amir ps Oops. I'm supposed to be working. Well, I may be disappearing for a week, although it's not really for work (my wife has her one week of the year of vacation next week so we're heading out). Which means I'm NOT going to do the lyx.org/LDN thing, although I think it's a great idea and it should be really easy to implement given the brilliantly modular design that Asger & I created. (Or just do the easy part of making a couple pages, and then ask me to do the fancy stuff. I'll probably fall for it, since I"m such a pushover.)
Re: reLyX
On Wed, Mar 01, 2000 at 11:59:12AM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> > "Andre" == Andre Poenitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> >> I don't know. How can reLyX tell that it's a \protect that LyX put
> >> in, and not one that the coder put in?
>
> Andre> Urmh... would the following work?
>
> Andre> Put \def\lyxprotect{\protect} in the preamble and use
> Andre> '\lyxprotect' for the 'helpers'. reLyX could then ignore
> Andre> \lyxprotect and copy \protect...
This should be able to work. The problem is that you have to decide
carefully just how many constructs you want lyx to create in the preamble.
I think I've seen a bunch of different problems (with reLyX and LyX in
general) that had solutions of this type, but you end up with a huge
preamble and less portable LaTeX if you use too many of them.
-Amir
Re: LDN
Allan: > > news.inc => news/news.inc > should either be split into [half-]year long archives > or we make a news/news.php3 that lets you "scroll" through the > list (news/news.php3?2 to get the news from the second pageful > of news_items) Sure. Naming things news_1999.php3 and linking them from the bottom of news.php3 would be clear and simple. And I think once per year maintenance isn't too bad. > news/format.inc > clean up so we get prettier looking entries > I'd like the news category beside the news title in news_item > for example -- at for the LDN issues anyway. Can't hurt. All that stuff was somewhat hacked together and I"m sure there's room for improvement. > I took a look at AbiWord's news page yesterday to see what the > competition are doing. Seems statistics are all the rage. > > Anyway, we trounce them on number of languages supported: 20 vs 15. > And nobody else does RTL that I'm aware of (living in my little > cocoon). Hold up! I'm not sure that we should be looking at them as competition. I've seen many "why should I use LyX instead of Word" mails but not one abiword one yet. The number of people in the world currently using neither Abi nor LyX is probably large enough that we don't have to worry about this for a while. So just because they use a lot of statistics, doesn't mean we have to either. Certainly, we ought to be tooting our own horn. But we should do it the way we want to. And actually, I didn't notice a focus on statistics. > Other stats that they like to list are numbers of emails, numbers of > lines of code changed or added. Shouldn't be too hard to generate big > numbers with Lars' current_view purge and so on. Frankly, I think number of emails is a silly stat. Same with lines changed. I mean, if you want to just once mention that Lars changed nK lines of code which proves how big the kernel rewrite is, that's fine. But I see no reason to do it often. > I couldn't figure out how to make a `ü' in > html so Jürgen missed out Hee hee. Darned foreigners can't just use regular letters like us educated folk. > News ideas: > + Personality Profiles > - like a mini interview or resume (wrt LyX) of a different > developer each fortnight -- starting with our illustrious leader Lars > (or maybe some comments from Matthias about why he started LyX). > Ideas? Each developers vision of where we're headed? Well, I'm worried that something like this might be a bit overambitious. Are you sure that (a) there are enough core developers that you'll be able to find one each fortnight? (b) Are you sure you (and they) will have time? I would suggest instead that *sometimes* you have one of the news items (what do you call the items that aren't tiny but aren't features - editorials?) be an interview/bio. No reason to promise certain things will happen in every issue. > + Statistics > - code count > - number of checkins per person > - number of emails on each list > - bugs fixed/created See above. I think some of these are silly. I find bugs fixed to be a neat thing in mozilla, but since we're not using bugzilla I think that'll be hard to track. Number of checkins is also rather meaningless. Again, I think this would be silly to have every time. Why not have a FUDD (Fortnightly Useless Developer Datum) in each issue. Things I think would be interesting on a one-time rather than fortnightly basis are: - number of people subscribing to each list (OK, maybe once per 6 months) - lines of code in LyX (Separated into C++, Perl, and other, of course :) - number of people in the CREDITS file - number of people who sent in patches in a given week (if it's large :) - number of pages of docs (OK, this requires someone latexing all of them - maybe number of K?) Even more Useless: - length of average post to lyx-devel, who's the most prolific (most posts) poster? Who's the most verbose poster (no contest there :)? - greatest number of insults on the list in 24 hours (e.g. a Friday) - number of beers drunk at the last LDM I'm sure you could come up with at least one thing to write each time. > + Major threads on the lists Great idea to steal! For example, if someone read that they might be drawn to a new area of development, or find an answer to a question they have, or something. But of course it's ok if this section is empty sometimes. > + Port info > - WinNT and Win98 > - OS/2 > - KDE/KLyX? Maybe the issue before or after the l10n/i18n issue could be about the "many flavors of LyX". You could also mention a bunch of unixes it's been on, and maybe even give some short hints on compiling issues, autoconf, etc. > + Aussie breakin? Why? > + Focus on a particular development area > - global variable purging (Lars and his current_view campaign) > - STL use I'd put these together. > - Mathed Where's Alejandro, btw? > - keymaps & i18n Or "non-English" in genera
autogen.sh
Finally got a few minutes free to try compiling lyx-devel. (My current version is 1.0.4pre1.) So I may have some errors to let you know about. autogen.sh should test automake's version. 1.3 doesn't understand the "-c" option, so it fails saying it didn't find automake. -Amir
Re: hollywood
> From: "Garst R. Reese" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: hollywood ok > To: Lyx Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 23:56:41 -0400 > > I downloaded the patch for ScriptWriter to abiWord. They have a long way > to go before they catch up with LyX :), but Larry is right about it > being part of a much bigger project, the GNU Freefilm project. Maybe a > note in LWN to remind folks about hollywood is in order. > Garst A note in LDN to remind folks about hollywood is not a bad idea BUT I don't think it should be done as a direct response to abiword. As I mentioned in my last email, I don't think a direct competition with them is a good idea. There's nothing wrong with mentioning a "did you know we support *** class" every once in a while, but I don't think that it should be in the same issue as the one where AbiWord says they support something like that. Can't we just make a good product? -Amir
FURF
Now that I'm writing my thesis, I actually need to use LyX heavily. So I suspect I'm going to be learning a lot about it. The bad news (for you) is that I'll probably come up with a bunch of feature requests. For now, it's a pretty simple one. You know how LyX 1.0.4 and on puts citations from a bunch of included documents into the "insert citations" menu? Well, what's the status on inter-document references? I've got each chapter of my thesis in a separate document (all of which are included in THESIS.lyx) and of course I'll want to refer from one to the other. I would think it would be the same technology... (RTFM's encouraged, if there's an FM for me to R.) -Amir
LDN
www.lyx.org/news currently points to the March 1 LDN! -Amir
lyx FAQ
Hi Mike. Congrats on taking this courageous step. Last I knew, Jose M. had the FAQ. Of course, that was around the release of 0.12.0... -Amir ps it's good to hear you've got so much free time right now. Would you like to type up a few sections of my thesis?
Re: lyx FAQ
On Thu, Mar 23, 2000 at 09:03:32AM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I'm only doing this because I figure I spend more time responding to FAQs > individually than I would spend writing a FAQ document (famous last > words), so I stupid enough to try to find out. Just don't hold your breath > waiting for a finished document (though hopefully pieces will go in soon). Btw, a November 1996 FAQ for LyX v0.10.7 (!) is at: http://www.paulwork.demon.co.uk/files/lyxfaq/lyxfaq.0.2.2.html I think quite a few of the questions (and possibly answers) are still relevant. Meanwhile, Jose's old page at med.pt ---which had a somewhat updated FAQ (e.g., I remember that it mentioned reLyX)--- disappeared. Hey, José, are you listening? -Amir
tex2lyx
I've got a bit more faith in Andre's tex2lyx converter. Using LaTeX to
translate LaTeX isn't just a cool hack---it happens to be the best way
to read LaTeX. That is, we know that LaTeX won't have any trouble reading
LaTeX input, even if it isn't "well-behaved".
What that means is that you won't be struggling with a lot of the
disadvantages I mentioned in my previous email.
(1) we know that optional arguments and commands without braces will be
handled OK.
(2) If you can get rid of the Perl wrapper, users won't need Perl, LeX, or
anything. We know they've got LaTeX. (Even if you can't get rid of it, it's
still significantly smaller.)
(3) If we get some LaTeX gurus to work on it, unknown stuff can probably be
perfectly isolated in TeX mode blocks (um, insets).
(4) We won't have any of that "I can't help you because I don't know Perl"
whining. :)
I think that badly-behaved LaTeX may still be your downfall, though. For
example, it looks like you translate {[} into a bracket. But what about a
plain [, which is probably how a lot of people will write it?
Anyway, this seems like an easier method than ltx2x, and one that will get
results sooner.
I'm still wondering, though. When exactly did we all decide reLyX should
retire?
-Amir
ltx2x
Kayvan said:
> Doing some searches on the net, I found a very interesting piece of
> software at http://www.nist.gov/sc4/editing/latex/programs/ltx2x/
>
> I am thinking of using it as the basis for a C-based reLyX replacement.
>
> Amir, can you take a look and tell me what you think?
Wow. It's pretty impressive.
Did you notice btw that it's on CTAN (tex-archive/support/ltx2x/) and that
it's now version 0.92?
My first reaction was of course "how dare you try to replace reLyX?!" Then
I realized that I was just thinking that because I put so much effort into
it. Considering that LyX 1.0 was initially supposed to make reLyX obsolete,
I can't really complain if a better latex converter comes along.
Advantages:
(1) It's in C, so people don't need to have Perl and I would think
it could even be included in the LyX code. (I assume you could distribute
the C rather than the lex etc. files. Otherwise, file this in
disadvantages.)
(2) It's under the LLPL, which I assume doesn't hurt the GPL? (If it does,
file this under disadvantages.)
(3) It can handle a whole lot of stuff. And I suspect that a lot more work
went into it than into the v0.01 Text::TeX module that's at the heart of
reLyX. (I may have put a lot of work into reLyX, but I only tinkered with
Text::TeX.)
That said, there are (at least) a couple problems with using it.
(1) One reason people didn't want to help work on reLyX was that they didn't
know Perl. How many people do you think will know lex, yacc, express-a, and
the ltx2x command table language?
(2) If you look at the ltx2x limitations, you'll see that e.g. it can't
handle x^2 (it requires you to write x^{2}) or {\em foo} (it requires
\emph{foo}). Those are, of course, two of the more popular LaTeX functions
(although hopefully people will stop using \em eventually, I wouldn't hold
my breath). That means that --- unless ltx2x overcomes these limitations at
some point --- you'll still need to use CleanTeX.pl, but that means
distributing reLyX AND something else!
(3) ltx2x has the same problem of not handling optional arguments correctly
that reLyX has, although it may be to a lesser extent.
(4) It seems like ltx2x may have some issues with \newcommands, though
probably not to the same extent that reLyX does.
(5) related to #2-4, I don't know how active development on ltx2x is. OTOH, it
may be powerful enough currently to handle just about everything you want
to.
(6) If you decide to do this, you'll be starting almost from scratch ---
you'll be able to use some of the reLyX output ideas, and the
syntax.defaults file e.g. says how many arguments each command takes. But
nonetheless you're going to have to write code-handling for every single
command. Which, trust me, is a lot of work. In addition, you are guaranteed
to run into situations where the way that ltx2x looks at things isn't the
way that LyX does, which will require kludging.
I hope I wasn't *too* biased. But to return to my knee-jerk reaction for
just a moment: why exactly do you want to replace reLyX rather than fix it?
-Amir
Re: tex2lyx
OK, in response to everyone's reassurances, consider my feathers unruffled. I'm not averse to using a completely different program in the long run; I just wanted to make sure people are aware that there are no easy fixes, and any attempt to write a new reLyX (rereLyX?) will take a lot of work and hacking (although if the LyX file format changes -- to xml, e.g., -- it might be easier). If it were Friday, I would be telling everyone I'm not talking to them anymore because I'm so offended, but I don't have the energy to be offended this morning. I'm also not offended that reLyX's feature in LDN has been delayed yet again. I'm sure it's not a conspiracy or anything. On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 08:01:04AM +0200, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > Erm... did I mentioned that is wasn't finished and that I didn't want to > show it to you in the first place? This is a bag full of hacks and I > know it ;-) :) > > I'm still wondering, though. When exactly did we all decide reLyX should > > retire? > > I did not yet. In fact, I see my attempt as a complementary way of > translating .tex to .lyx. Once tex2lyx is useable I could even imagine > two import modes until we figured out which one is better in *all* cases. Having a second method of TeX import (from the command line only) might not be a bad idea, too. -Amir ps Kayvan, good to hear you're getting stuff done.
lyx.org links?
Should the lyx.org link to "stable sources" (e.g. on the main page; I guess also on the download page) link to the fix* sources? -Amir
lyx.org links
JMarc, my point is that a 1.1.4 plus the two patches is more stable than plain 1.1.4, so there should be somewhere that a person can download the patched sources from! Remember, we're trying to keep LyX stable during development. Most people won't have the energy to download 1.1.4 and the patches before compiling. -Amir
Master TOC
> I've commited a Master Table of Contents to the lyxdoc repository
> (TOC.lyx) along with the shell script that got me 98% of the way there.
> (As an exercize for Amir, rewrite it with 5 lines of Perl code ...). Let
> me know if you like it.
I don't really understand why you used that instead of the working but buggy
doc_toc.pl. Oh, I see. All that stuff to get the page & section numbers. You
certainly could do that in Perl (using the 'system' function to call latex).
However, do we really think that many people will be printing out all of the
LyX documentation? If not, then all you need is the section number, and we
can get that the same way (I assume) LyX GUI does, by counting sections.
So, for your reading pleasure, I'm attaching doc_toc.pl and toc.lyx.
doc_toc.pl is 107 lines. If I got rid of the comments and whitespace, I
could shrink it, though to get it to five lines they would have to be really
long lines :) I'm attaching it so we can have a csh vs. Perl write-only
competition.
If you like it, it ought to be trivial to add subsubsections. I'm not
entirely sure that's a good idea. You'd think that if we had good section
titles, it would be clear which section you need to go to. But maybe not. Of
course, once we've got foldable insets, we can have the best of both worlds.
I was shocked and horrified to see that you used WYSIWYG tools to get the
indenting happening. (My friend's resume was a LaTeX document with like 8000
~'s all over the page to get spacing exactly right, which similarly shocked
and horrified me. OTOH, he has since gotten a post doc and a job; I'm still
working on my PhD.) I'm using Descriptions instead. Admittedly, that does
seem to lead to a larger space between lines. (If negative spaces worked "as
expected" in the LyX GUI, we'd be OK, but I guess there are dangers with
supporting that, like overlapping text.)
If we ever get cross-doc references going, we can have links to all the
sections (though that requires giving them all labels...) instead of the
section numbers.
If you're *not* going to be using doc_toc.pl (hint: silly idea) I can still
probably turn toc_make into slightly more readable perl (no, really!)
-Amir
toc.lyx.gz
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
@ARGV = map {"$_.lyx"} qw
(Intro Tutorial UserGuide Extended Customization FAQ Reference)
unless @ARGV;
my $in_sec = 0; # in top-level section (e.g. chapter for book class) or Title
my $in_sub_sec = 0; # in second-level section (e.g. section for book class)
# First print out initial info
print <<"ENDPREAMBLE";
#This file was created by The LyX Team Robot
#LyX 1.0 (C) 1995-1999 Matthias Ettrich and the LyX Team
\\lyxformat 2.15
\\textclass article
\\layout Title
LyX Doc Table of Contents
ENDPREAMBLE
my $match = "";
my $ignore = 0; # ignore lines (e.g. footnote in a heading)
my $sub_match;
my @sec_counter;
# Now loop through files
while (<>) {
# first few lines of the file
unless ($match) {
if (/^\\textclass (\w+)/) {
# Hopefully it's book, report, or article
my $class = $1;
if ($class eq "article") {
$match = "Section";
$sub_match = "Subsection";
} else {
$match = "Chapter";
$sub_match = "Section";
}
}
next;
}
# Footnotes in a section heading could confuse things!
# And don't bother printing out section labels.
if (/^\\begin_float footnote/ || /^\\begin_inset LatexCommand \\label/) {
$ignore = 1;
}
# Unset ignoring. But note that end_inset could be the end of another
# kind of inset!
if ($ignore && /^\\end_(float|inset)/) {
$ignore = 0;
next; # don't print out \end_float line
}
next if $ignore;
# Now actually handle title & section headings
if (/^\\layout Title/) {
$in_sec = 1;
$sec_counter[0] = 0; # (re)start section counter
print "\\layout Section*\n";
} elsif (/^\\layout $match/) {
if ($in_sub_sec) {
print "\\end_deeper\n";
$in_sub_sec = 0;
}
$sec_counter[0]++;
$in_sec = 1;
print "\\layout Description\n$sec_counter[0] ";
} elsif (/^\\layout $sub_match/) {
$in_sec = 1;
unless ($in_sub_sec) {
$in_sub_sec = 1;
$sec_counter[1] = 0;
print "\\begin_deeper\n";
}
$sec_counter[1]++;
print "\\layout Description\n$sec_counter[0].$sec_counter[1] ";
# Finished with a heading when we get to a new \layout command
} elsif ($in_sec) {
if (/^\\layout /) {
$in_sec = 0;
} else {
print;
}
}
# First few lines of each file, $match isn't set yet
if (eof) {
if ($in_sub_sec) { # from end of last file
print "\\end_deeper\n";
$in_sub_sec = 0;
}
$match = "";
}
}
END{
print "\n\\the_end\n";
}
lyx CVS check ins?
I didn't get any mail about Mike's lyxdoc CVS checkins. In fact, I think I may not have gotten a couple previous ones either. Is there no cvslog equivalent for lyxdoc? -Amir
master TOC
Sorry I'm not replying to the actual message, but that's more complicated to do when you're reading messages via the digest. Anyway, JMarc, the master TOC will on the contrary be very useful when you haven't printed out the docs, because the section numbers are listed. Frankly, I find it hard to imagine that very many people will print out the docs and reference the printed docs on a normal basis. Which is why my master TOC didn't have page numbers. (Also because it's Hard to get them, and I didn't feel like expending the effort.) Speaking of which, which version of the master TOC is going to be included in the 1.1.5 prerelease? Guess which one I'll vote for? :) -Amir
Master TOC
OK. I checked the new TOC.lyx in. Hopefully Mike won't get angry. But hey, it's almost Friday anyway. I also checked in Doc_toc.pl, which is the (slightly more than 5-line) script that creates TOC.lyx. Lars, all you need to do is "Doc_toc.pl > TOC.lyx" before you move the lyxdoc module into lyx-devel to make a doc release. Or put it in your script, if you've got one. (I guess you have to cvs ci the new TOC.lyx too, in theory. Or maybe you don't want to put it in CVS since it's a generated file?) I was thinking of changing font sizes for sections vs. subsections etc., but that might make it harder, rather than easier to read, and we've already got indentation to tell us which stuff is more important. Besides, normal TOCs don't have them. I would also make the spacing between Description items smaller if it worked in the LyX GUI. But I think it's still not *too* long a doc and probably people will be skimming or even Finding in it, so it shouldn't matter much. Page numbers would be difficult, as we'd have to latex the files and pull the numbers out of the resulting .toc files. Mike did that in toc_make, so we know it's possible, but I'd prefer to avoid it. And as I've said, I think very few people actually print out all the docs anyway. Of course, one's work is never done. For example, why don't we have fr_TOC.lyx? It seems to work OK, but maybe someone who understands should look at it. For instance, JMarc, try "Doc_toc.pl fr*.lyx > fr_TOC.lyx" and see what happens. I could strip the \language line out of the preamble of, say, the first file we look at. OTOH, french only has 3 doc files (what are you guys waiting for?) Would you want to put, say, the English User Guide stuff in there? Then we would need to change languages in the middle, right? Or is it better to have a fr_TOC.lyx that has just the french docs and if that doesn't work you can check TOC.lyx? That seems more logical, but might be less intuitive for new users, say. Also, what other stuff do I have to copy out of the preamble. (\quotes_language? Other stuff?) Comments appreciated. -Amir
text inset
FWIW, as someone who's not contributing to lyx at all right now, let me come down on the side of opposing red dots except when absolutely necessary. Each thing you add to LyX makes it that much more confusing for new users, in addition to becoming more cluttered for experienced users. For language, as opposed to font changes, I guess you might want to have some GUI stuff. (Since it's much more rare for most users, it'll be less confusing.) If you're only going to have two languages, tehre are several possibilities, like having a different background color or something. For RTL/LTR the most logical thing to me seems to be something like | <-|-> | ALternatively, you could change the cursor depending on the direction. -Amir
gtk conversion
Allan, are you trying to goad me into suggesting replacing your conv.sh with perl? For example, you'd then have a simple interface with gtkconvert, which is already in perl. But also, I have to imagine the things that you're finding tough will become easier. (Maybe not a lot easier, if you don't know Perl, but still doable.) (I'm going away tomorrow to thursday, btw.) -Amir
Re: wish list
IMO, there shouldn't be lots of different ways of looking at the TOC. Seems like overkill and too many features. Why have a separate menu of the TOC when you can get it with keys, mouseclick, or menu selection? -Amir
Re: Problem with link
Anyone know where it went? I can't get to mx.lyx.org at all. On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 12:44:27PM +0200, Roberto Alcázar Calzada wrote: > I`m trying to access the Web page with the spanish version of Lyx but i > can´t!! > The link is in the About section (Non-English subsection) and is the > spanish link: > > http://www.mx.lyx.org/es > > Can you help me? > > Roberto Alcázar Calzada
Re: Ideas
Ben Cazzolato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: [Chris Eliasmith suggestes cross-referencing between documents] > This is already possible. You can cross reference labels in other docs > cause I needed to do this with my thesis (split into chapters). The trick > is to open the two (or more docs you need). Go Insert Reference in the doc > that has the reference, then switch to the other doc in which you want to > insert it. I tried it and it didn't work. So I figured 1.0.4pre1 (yes, I'm that obsolete) wasn't good enough and downloaded a fresh CVS copy and compiled it (no errors with gcc 2.95 19990728! Cool!) and it still didn't work. Then I thought about it a bit, and reread what he wrote, and it works (and may have worked in 1.0.4 for all I know.) The key here, which Ben said but I didn't get, is that you have to leave the Insert Reference popup OPEN while you switch docs. If you close the popup, and then switch docs, and reopen, then only the new doc's labels are available. This is of course not optimal, even if it works. If it didn't allow cross-referencing between docs, I would even call it a bug that the labels listed in the popup don't change to reflect the current doc. Have people thought about fixes? The simplest (?) would be to list all the labels from all open docs. However, if you have, say, the User Guide, Extended, and a few other docs open, that could get ugly. Another option would be to have a button that toggles between all the labels or just from the current doc. Even better would be a nesting thing like in the file browser. You list all the labels from the current doc, and in boldface, the names of all other docs. Clicking on that shows/hides the labels from that doc. What do you think? -Amir
Re: Ideas
On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 12:24:07AM +0300, Dekel Tsur wrote: > On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 04:38:53PM +0100, Ben Cazzolato wrote: > > If it wasn't mentioned before, LyX has the following feature: > If you use the Insert Reference dialog in a document that includes other > documents, LyX will automatically load all included documents, > and show all available keys when you open the Insert Reference dialog in > either the parent or the children documents. You're right! OTOH, that's bad. As Ben said, that's almost worse than using the kludge, because you end up having a whole lot of keys to keep track of, even though most of the time you want to cross reference within a key. -Amir
Suggestions for LyX improvement
Hello, Vitor. You wrote that (1) you'd like LaTeX/LyX conversion to be better, and (2) you'd like a description of what constructs not to use. Please try "man reLyX", which is a long man page that describes exactly what reLyX can and can't handle. (See also the BUGS document in the reLyX directory of the distribution.) If there's anything that reLyX doesn't support which is *not* in the manpage -- and which can not be supported by changing the syntax.defaults file -- then feel free to send in a specific suggestion of a construct/macro/etc. that is not supported. I won't guarantee that anything will be changed, since I've dropped reLyX development and the person who picked it up is pretty busy. But we can maybe put it on the TODO list. -Amir Karger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
reLyX bug
OK. I haven't touched reLyX in months, and I haven't been latexing either.
And I don't have the energy to look through the reLyX source. So I'm not
entirely sure whether there this is the right thing to do. However, I've
fixed what might be a bug.
--- ../CVS/lyx-devel/lib/reLyX/LastLyX.pm Sun Mar 5 12:54:25 2000
+++ LastLyX.pm Mon Jun 5 16:50:56 2000
@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@
if ($main::opt_o) { # all files go to outputdir; no path nec.
$newfile = "$basename.lyx";
} else { # keep relative path, e.g. Just change suffix
- ($newfile = $fil) =~ s/$suffix/.lyx/;
+ ($newfile = $fil) =~ s/$suffix$/.lyx/;
}
s/\Q{$fil}\E/{$newfile}/;
} # end special if for table, bibstyle, include
Kayvan, could you take a look at this and confirm it's what we should've
been doing all along? And could you figure out why noone else has noticed
this problem yet? I.e., why did it happen in Tomasz' case, but noone else's?
Tomasz, could you confirm that this fixes the problem?
Thanks.
-Amir
Meeting
Hey, guys, have a great time at the FILM! (Will next year's meeting also be called FILM?) It's not too late if anyone wants to send me two free tickest to Norway. I'm sure my wife would love to see the scenery while I hacked. The FILM would be a great excuse to write up another LDN, don't you think? (And don't forget to mention cut & paste in it!) Oh, and while I'm pretending it's Friday: If anyone here is sick of coding in C++ and yearns for the simple days of Applesoft or Commodore 64 or GW BASIC, I've written a Perl module that runs BASIC programs. I just uploaded v1.35 to http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/A/AK/AKARGER/ although it may take a few hours to propagate to all the mirrors (Yes, I know I stopped working on reLyX because I was supposedly so busy doing my thesis. So sue me.) -Amir
FILMania
Congratulations to all the developers! It sounds like you guys got a tremendous amount done, despite doing your best to kill lots of brain cells. I guess that Asger is like a small child; you know you really have to worry when he's being quiet. Are we going to release 1.1.6 today? -Amir
Version numbers
I really don't think we have to follow the linux kernel numbering system. There are a gazillion packages out there, each of which has its own system. I think as long as the website & docs stay consistent, we can have whatever scheme we would like. (The only important thing, IMO, is the 1.0 label, since I think almost everyone assumes pre-1.0 is unstable. Luckily, we passed that one.) If it will make people happier to have each release go from 1.1 to 1.2 and then to make 1.1.y instead of 1.1fixy, I suppose it won't hurt anybody. Btw, as far as changing the READMEs, the problem is that it *should* say that it's a development release for all the development releases. So changing it in CVS wouldn't work. I don't suppose anyone has the energy to have a 'make stable' target that puts "this is a stable release" into README and a 'make cvs' which puts "this is a development release" in? -Amir
Re: LyX version numbering change proposal
(Sorry that my digest reading means I don't use the In-Reply-To field & stuff) From: Andre Poenitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > It's just another encoding of version numbers. With the "new" scheme I think you're thinking too much like a Mathematician. > old:"new" > 1.1.5cvs1.3.x "development, many new features" But we don't have any releases that would fall under this category. > 1.1.5pre1 1.3.91 "development, bugfixing, some features" > 1.1.5pre2 1.3.92 "development, bugfixing, sneaking feature > 1.1.5pre3 1.3.93 "development, bugfixing" ...and since Lars doesn't like 9x, we don't have any of these either. So why would we want to have a 1.3 cycle? > It does not affect "development cycle length" at all. To clarify, there is no such thing as a "development, many new features" release. That's what Lars et. al were saying about long development cycles. After the lyx-devel branch languished for months and months, the developers decided that the separation between devel and non-devel branches had to stop. (Although they took that back a bit in order to do fix releases.) Instead, each time a major feature or two goes into the code, its main coder and/or his (her?) helpers are forced to stabilize it. Otherwise, a coder might put in some new unstable code and then get distracted by something for a few months. The great part of this is that it means we The Linux kernel has pretty long development cycles. I don't know whether that was because kernels are inherently more complicated and need to be much more stable than LyX before you can risk an official release, or what, but Linus was unsuccessful in his attempt to shorten the development cycle. (Well, maybe he shortened it some, but not as much as he wanted.) Given the much smaller devel community, we just can't afford to have such long devel cycles. Therefore, we would never have any 1.3.x releases. And I don't think it's worth skipping 1.3 entirely just to make a few people happy. > It is just a "new" number scheme that happens to be fairly well known > since a lot of linux related software use it. And a lot of linux related software doesn't. Since emacs was mentioned, I'll reflexively throw vim onto the pile. Other examples: all the other GNU tools (AFAIK), Perl, Python... And do they use the linux kernel numbering scheme in the world of IRIX, OS/2, HP, and Cygwin? You had an OK point, but I think it was intelligently addressed, and the decision was made that clinging to the linux kernel devel numbers for a project that's very unlike the linux kernel just doesn't make sense -- especially if it would force the us to skip entire version numbers. > People will not ask themselves whether "pre" is "preferable", "pretty", > "predictable" or just a "prefix" that happends to stand at the end of the > word... Urm... I'm sorry. It's up to us to have an updated website & readme, yes, but the user has to take SOME responsibility. > Any distributor checking for new releases sees 1.2.x and says "Oh, that > number looks stable", perhaps double checks README and voila - > good old 1.1.4 got on thousands of CDs. I assume you mean 1.0.4. So you don't think Perl 5.005, Python 1.5.1... are on any CDs? Yes, LyX is a smaller project, so they'll pay less attention, but I have to imagine they'll do a bit better than that. In fact, what they most probably do is look for a foo.stable.tgz, which we have, linked to 1.1.5. -Amir
lyx-foo@lists.lyx.org
Several options: (1) Point out on the website that there's no such address as lyx-foo. (Apparently the word "hypothetical" is either not understood by some people or being ignored.) (2) Change the website to use lyx-users for everything first, and then say, "there's also a lyx-devel and lyx-announce, and they're exactly the same, only s/users/devel/". (No, I wouldn't write s/// on the web site.) (3) set up an autoreply from lyx-foo to tell people that they really ought to mail to lyx-users-subscribe et al. (4) set up a mailing list call lyx-foo which we only use on Fridays. #2 is probably the best solution, even if #4 would be more fun. If a couple people agree, I'll make the changes. (I feel responsible for writing the page, though I thought it was less confusing than the version before it.) -Amir
lyx-foo
JMarc said: #5: have 3 identical pages for the lists, parameterized via php, where only the relevant data changes. So there should be a main page (with maybe the truly generic information) with three links to list-specific pages. Problem with that is that for lyx-announce we don't want to give the mailing list's address, since in theory noone should be posting to it. Also, lyx-devel and lyx-users have digests, but lyx-docs doesn't. Also, users & devel have some of their messages archived elsewhere. So I think it won't be possible to create 3 (or 4) identical pages, and the pages we would have to make would be different enough that the php parameterization wouldn't really help. I'm writing up a new page; we'll see if it looks OK. -Amir
lyx-foo
OK. try http://www.lyx.org/~karger/www-user/internet/mailing.php3 for the latest version. I can't tell whether it makes any more sense than the original, but at least I got rid of the dreaded lyx-foo. Let me know what you think. Incidentally, a totally radical option would be to create a bunch of buttons that would subscribe/unsubscribe to each list, digest, get help messages, etc. Or a form where you select: - devel, user, docs or announce - subscribe, unsubscribe, help (index?) - email address to subscribe to Then the form creates the required [EMAIL PROTECTED] address and sends off a message. We could even have a separate form to send to one of the mailing lists, if a person is too lazy to use regular email. -Amir
Re: LyX version numbering change proposal
On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 08:33:00PM +0200, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote: > As far as I can see, the conclusion is that the numbering > scheme as such is not that important. > The main thing is to communicate which ever system is used. > I thought Lars and even one or two others agreed on a slight change in the system. Something like changing 1.x.fixY to 1.x.Y. I agree with the idea, because the only things that go into fix versions are things everyone should get. So folks will be told to download the latest x and Y, which is a pretty intuitive and simple system. (Even more intuitive and simple than the Linux kernel system, IMO!) Anyone who's curious about pre/cvs/whatever versions can take the time to read the files describing the naming/numbering system. Which brings up Asger's second point. No, I'm not volunteering for the job. -Amir
Re: lyx-foo
Mate: I basically think of a daemon as a program that waits for input and returns output. Which is to say, any program at all is really a daemon :) More specifically, a program that is specifically designed to always be on in the background, and to do something interesting when it receives requests, like ftpd, telnetd, et al. How is ezmlm different? At least from the outside, it looks just the same.o I put in a note about the message header, but not a very useful one. I'll check it in at some point. I don't really have the energy to create a form, even though it might be the best solution. -Amir
Spanish doc problem
fermi2:~/lyx/CVS/lyxdoc>lyx es_Intro.lyx LyX: Unknown argument `spanish' [around line 20 of file es_Intro.lyx] Can someone who knows Spanish fix this to be the correct kind of quotes? (I.e., change layout->quotes) -Amir
