Alex Fernandez wrote:
Hi Richard,On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Richard Heck <rgh...@bobjweil.com> wrote:Hi, Alex. This is going to seem critical, but it is going to end up being constructive. See below.Contrary to my expectations it did not get constructive in the end, so busy people can safely skip the discussion below.
Hmm. I thought it did. Sorry.
See below again. But you can easily to create a LyX document with some theorem environments, if you want to continue with this approach.Thanks, but I don't want to learn advanced LyX; I am happy to convert the output :D Therefore I would appreciate it if you could send me the sample yourself. The one you used before would be fine.
Here's a simple sample, attached.
Actually, I'm not that interested in HTML output myself at all. But there are other people who are: It's a very common request, as you yourself have seen by the excitement about elyxer. So, qua developer who tries to be responsive to users' needs, I'm interested and trying to figure out how best to do this.You can easily create a LyX document with some BibTeX. And if you want to work on this, then you can probably use the python-bibtex package to parse the files. Figuring out how the bibliography is supposed to be rendered will be more difficult, though maybe there's not so much of a need to render it precisely as BibTeX would. Or maybe you could (optionally?) use the bbl file. But see below again.Sure, I can create a lot of things but I don't use BibTeX myself, and nobody has cared about it enough to send a sample -- that is why it is not working at the moment. Again, if you cannot be bothered to send me the sample I assume you are not really interested to get it working in HTML form.
If you don't use BibTeX, you should. It will make your bibliography handing a lot more pleasant, unless you never cite the same thing twice. You can also use something like JabRef to keep short notes on articles, and the like. It's a nice program.
My point was much the same as Pavel's: the existing tools actually do much the same sort of job, and just about as well, though perhaps with fewer bells and whistles. What I thought would be the advantage of elyxer, or some such tool, was that it would do a BETTER job and support MORE features. But elyxer supports fewer, at present. Maybe it can support more. That'd be great. What I'm interested in, qua developer, is how to get the BEST output we can get, in whatever formats people need.LyX will always output to plain text, and that's readily importable in Word. If one wants to output to a format that preserves a good bit of the formatting, then latex2rtf does a fine job, so long as you don't have too much math, etc. (I've used that for collaboration myself, so I know.) Properly configured, which is apparently a challenge on some operating systems, htlatex will do excellent conversion both to HTML and to ODT, and plastex does a very good job converting to HTML, though with some limits, including the fact that all the math is little pictures (though it does handle cross-references and BibTeX nicely). So there are lots of options. None of that means the world can't use a better mousetrap. See below.So latex2rtf is fine "as long as you don't have too much math"? So you don't like eLyXer because it doesn't support 100% of the LyX featureset, and then you suggest some tools which support even less features _and_ produce subpar output? No offense, but it is a funny position. I am sure however that there is a valid reasoning behind the contradiction, and would be delighted to hear it.
OK, good. What it does is up to you and anyone else who wants to work on it. If you're happy with it as it is, then that's fine with me. But...That depends how much of LyX's source you care to convert. If you want to handle custom styles, then the problem is the same. Which was my point.Which I don't, I think that has been made clear from the start. That is one of the reasons that eLyXer is lean, and it should stay this way.
...I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who don't need what you call "advanced" features. Most of us here would regard them as absolutely central to what LyX is. In particular, LyX's ability to support different document classes and the like, rather than being limited to having certain layouts hardcoded, is a pretty central feature. The introduction of character styles, in 1.5, was regarded as a *major* step forward, and my sense (if I say so myself) is that the introduction of modules in 1.6 has made LyX much, much more flexible than it used to be. If we had a layout editor, which we so desperately want---hey, Vincent, *that* could be your defining contribution to LyX---then custom styles and the like would become absolutely common. But even as things are, we very much hope that anyone who uses LyX for serious work will use it the way it is intended, with as many custom layouts and character styles as they need to create to produce true semantic markup. (Cf any note written by Steve Litt.)So the question is: What do we have to do if we're going to get really good HTML output for more than fairly simple LyX files, let alone for LyX's full functionality?Nope, sorry. The question is: do you want to do a reasonable conversion for 99% of your potential users and support their simple needs, or do you want to embark in a hard, difficult, error prone and laborious task? For me the answer is clear.
So, well, LyX is a tool, and you can use it to do what you want. But if you're not using LyX the way described, as your tendency to dismiss these things you happen not to use as "advanced features" suggests, then you're really missing out on what LyX is.
I don't think that's what Pavel quite said. And I'm pretty sure that getting something workable set up would take very little effort. Right now, I haven't the time, but maybe later.Getting something workable that does as much as eLyXer now does would be pretty easy, because we already have access to the complete structure of the document. Lots of the output code could almost be cut and paste from the other output routines. The challenge will be to get good rendering of the math. Addressing other issues, like file splitting, would take some work, but not too much. Note that we can even get a good TOC this way. Dealing with cross-references and BibTeX becomes easy, too, because we have all the information we need ready to hand. (Of course, there will be issues, but you get my point.)Good luck with that. As Pavel says below, this problem is again orders of magnitude harder than what eLyXer set to solve. And it is both complex and ungrateful, if you plan to support 100% of LyX features.
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thm.lyx
Description: application/lyx
