On Thursday 30 April 2009 16:26:08 Richard Heck wrote: > Yes, I think that's right. But if we're thinking of HTML as a different > output format, then of course LaTeX-based ERT isn't really relevant, any > more than it would be to DocBook. > > I'm trying to think of this more in a way that involves easily switching > output formats than in terms of having completely different ones, so > that we're not supposed to have totally different layouts for HTML and > LaTeX, as with DocBook vs LaTeX. But you could have a completely > different output format, too.
After reading most of the lost threads over gmane this is my take on this issue. It should be possible to do what you propose. That is to have an independent format of lyx that does not care about the used back-end be it latex, docbook or html. Your proposal and Jean-Marc's before (in 2000 or so), if I understand it well, is to be able to write in the textclass the layout code to convert the lyx files to the different output formats. These output formats are those that we care the most pdf, html and simple text. We have developed the layout files and we have been cleaning and improving them over last releases. IMHO the reason why this goal is not (yet) achieved is that our layout language is not yet powerful enough to express the different kinds of transformations needed to produce the output. I will choose now one example that is simply latex related to show some of inadequacies of our transformation language (the layout files). There are latex classes where the table captions should come first and only then the table, there are others where the caption must go after the table. I have worked with both types of latex classes so this is a real example and not a fancy example to make my point. It happened at several conferences where they started with one style and then for some reason changed the mandatory latex style to be another depending on the target journal. When I change the latex class of the lyx document I must manually catch all the tables and do the appropriate change or else the new document will fail. Ideally what I would like to have is a system where lyx has a clear set of instruction that says that every table float should be written according to the appropriate rule. Another strange classes that I have worked before placed all the title examples in the preamble and so maketitle was called before the beginning of the document. In this case I would like to have lyx placing the title chunk in the preamble automatically. Since we can't even having this class change working seamlessly between latex classes how do we expect to have this working before different output formats? One possible solution would be to use a more dynamic language to allow some of the out of the order changes. FWIW the language that was made specially for this purpose was xslt. I am not saying that we should adopt this but at least we could learn from the way it works. I hope this makes sense. -- José Abílio
