An idea has been percolating in my head for some time and I thought I'd share in the off chance it has a viral effect on someone out there. I've used LaTeX for years, eventually switching to LyX which I think is wonderful. I will soon switch exclusively to OpenOffice because of the need to collaborate with others using MSWord and OOffice. Change tracking is crucial among other things. Up to now, I've resisted because of bibtex and tex math markup. This will soon be irrelevant because version 3 of OOffice will have world class bibliography support (from appearances) far better than bibtex. It is possible now to directly embed tex equations into OOffice documents and I expect this capability to improve, but also to be eventually replaced by a (quality) fully graphical equation editor. The momentum is behind OOffice. The gains are starting to outweigh the costs.
What I occasionally wonder is whether the LyX experience -- easy structured document editing -- could be brought to OOffice? It has a full programming API. One could code a new editor using UNO or modify the current word processor with macros, etc. Export to latex is already in-place (but would need major improvements to match lyx). For me, pretty output is not actually that important as my main consumers are collaborators and editors. Its the beauty of what-you-see-is-what-you-mean (sorry, I forget if that's the exact phrase) that to me matters. Seems with some creativity, that experience could be migrated to OOffice. The big gain would be ODF support and all the underlying infrastructure for spell checking and revision features. Some will see red at the suggestion. Fine. I suspect this will get dropped on the floor. I'm not really asking for something, just sharing a thought. I realize its hard to get volunteer developers to work on code they may not like. (I'm the same way.) It would require abandoning the not-invented-here reaction and believing that the long-term benefits of a being part of a large code ecosystem evolving around OOffice outweigh the (admittedly substantial) cost of changing platforms. Guess I've always been a fan of convergences. Cheers, THK PS. Did a quick search on this list for OpenOffice and only found requests for ODF support. Hope I'm not flogging an old debate. -- T. -- Timothy H. Keitt, University of Texas at Austin Contact info and calendar at http://www.keittlab.org/tkeitt/ Reprints at http://www.keittlab.org/tkeitt/papers/ ODF attachment? See http://opendocumentfellowship.org/
