>
> > Might I ask, what are a few straightforward examples of the new capabilities
> > a scripting language will provide users of lyx?
That's what I was asking myself all the time but since I missed the
start of the thread I thought I should keep my mouth shut, but ...
> Of course, a scripting language will not provide anything that is not possible
> if we wrote the stuff directly in C++, but the scripting language will
> hopefully make things easier, because we work at a higher abstraction level.
> And therefor, we will get a potential larger population of developers and thus
> a higher production, because you don't need to understand C++, wait for a
> compiler, make sure the code works on gcc 2.7.2, and other disadvantages of
> C++.
Looks like a valid point, but the remainder looks like re-inventing the
wheel (at least on Unix):
> For instance, running LyX in batch mode:
> Write a small script which will open all *.lyx documents in a directory
> structure, and convert them to postscript.
Could be done by 'make' if there was an command line switch for
'generate .tex only'. I conjecture most people use 'make' anyway for
larger projects so there is no 'new complication'. I, e.g., usually
store pictures as .fig only and produce postscript only if I need to.
> ...
> Daily time saving rutines: If you need to swap two columns in a table, record
> a macro that will swap the stuff for one line, and replay that on the lines
> that needs to be swapped.
One should be able to mark a rectangular bit of a table anyway (and IIRC
Juergen wanted to have something like this, too), so swapping to colums
would amount to 'Add Column', 'Mark column', CTRL-C, move Cursor,
CTRL-V, move cursor, 'Delete Column'. No need for a script here *I*
think.
> I.e. some operations that are useful in some
> situations, but still not general enough to warrant to get it's on feature.
> Other examples could be swapping two words and put in a comma, to arrange a
> list of people's names.
Something like s/^(\w+)\s(\w+)$/\2, \1/ ?
How long a script for doing this would be?
> Write a script which will spellcheck all documents in a directory, collect all
> the misspellings, and write them to a file.
'make'
> Or, if the spellchecker is
> interfaced nicely (or done in the scripting language), spellcheck all documents
> at the same time.
'make'
>
> Do mail-merge, and connect to a real database for the addresses.
external shell script that could be included in the distribution.
> Do conditional documents: In the document, there will be a toggle-button. If
> that is clicked, the language of the document would be Danish. If not, the text
> would be English (or similar things.)
I don't understand this point...
> Do the graphical tutorial interactively in 25Kb rather than posively in 1,25
> MB.
and neither this ;-)
As Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it: Perfection is not attained if there
is nothing more to add, but if there is nothing more to take away.
> it would be technically possible to write a mail-reader in LyX scheme.
Yes, this could be possible. But if I need only the capability to write
'wysiwyg' LaTeX - and that's the reason I use LyX currently - I cannot see
the point of adding any of the features you have in mind. Just make sure
that all functionality of LyX is reachable from the command line and
leave the rest to the usual toolbox.
But if you decide to have all this fancy stuff, I beg you, please
provide some 'lean' distribution, too.
Andre'
--
Andre' Poenitz, TU Chemnitz, Fakultaet fuer Mathematik
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ... +49 3727 58 1381
