José Matos wrote:
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.
Nice to have you back, as I said before.
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.
I only realized late that this was what I was proposing, in effect. Of
course, getting decent HTML output need not quite depend upon that, but
could be a kind of "test case" on the way to that goal.
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.
Yes, precisely.
I will choose now one example [snip]
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.
We've seen this problem on the user list.
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.
How much of this do you think could be done using regexes?
I hope this makes sense.
Yes, enough. Really doing this right would take some work. But maybe
trying to do it for HTML, say, might help us to get a sense for what's
needed and where the real problems lie. And we'd get decent HTML output
as a side benefit of the experiment.
Richard
