On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
> LyX will hopefully support many different kinds of work -- not
> only lots of different formats such as SGML, HTML, LaTeX, Ascii,
> man pages, etc., but also completely new areas: Literate programming
> in a WYSIWYG environment, intelligent dynamic documents, and what
> else you can imagine.
I realy like LaTeX, but it is a good tool (ok, the *best* tool) for
rendering printed documents, not for online doc. LaTeX *allows* you to
write strutured documentation, but it does not imposes constraints like a
SGML DTD does. LaTeX and SGML arte related to structured documents as C++
and Smalltalk are to Object Oriented programming.
> (Disclaimer: I have all these strange ideas for LyX, but this does
> not imply that LyX will loose it's LaTeX lead. A lot of the other
> developers will take care of that, I'm sure.)
I'm using only LyX and SGMLtools now and I'm very satisfied. I see LyX as
an excelent starting point for a text programming Visual Development
Environment. LyX is a visual programming tool. The concept behind the
application is very interesting.
To become a true *document* processing system, I believe that in the
future it should support:
1 Different "rendering" backends, as SGMLtoos does with LaTeX, groff and
HTML (forget GNU info: it's dead).
2 Figures in different formats, booth raster and vector graphics,
including at least GIF, JPEG, PNG and CGM. FIG may be a good choice too,
because TransFig can convert to many formats (lacks for CGM).
3 Networking/database support. SQL, CORBA, GNOME? Who knows?
4 Integration with WEB server. BTW, did you look at the SIAG's HTTP server
feature?
IMO, the most important change now is the GUI toolkit. Xforms is too
limiting (no I18n support), *ugly* and hard to configure. It is not Open
Source too. OK, I admit: *all* the toolkits I used have disavantages, but
Xforms is the only one whose source code was not available to make the
fixes.
The scripting language is the second target. I like the SGMLtools
structure: a bunch of small code pieces joined by a "wrapper" script. LyX
could be structured this way too. I think that Tcl (perhaps Pyton, I don't
kow it yet) is a good choice. The Tk toolkit is interesting too, because
it is available for many operating systems, and is independent of X.
Just some ideas...
#!/bin/sh
cat < flames > /dev/null
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Carlos A M dos Santos Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
estudante de mestrado Pós-Graduação em Ciência de Computação
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Telefone +55 51 316-6161 Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, CEP 91501-970
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