Hi all, I just solved two very difficult LyX problems using Vim, and it reminded me just how lucky we are that the current LyX native format is easily readable and parsable by a normally intelligent human.
In the first case, LyX would crash about 3 seconds after opening a document in 1.6.3. For various reasons I suspected it was the overly large .eps cover art, but I encountered a buried shovel. If only I could get LyX to work, I could change the cover art, and if only I could change the cover art, I could get LyX to work. Vim to the rescue: I changed cover.eps to cover.pdf to work around the problem (which I suspect is a LyX ungraceful handling of a too large graphic). In the second case, I had an indexing problem preventing making the PDF. Using diagnostics like the ilg, ind and idx files, I narrowed it down to five possible culprit index entries. I got it down to one error, but the .ind file was showing a backslash that didn't exist in the LyX index entry. When I opened the LyX file in Vim, the problem stuck out like a sore thumb -- there was an extra inset and some other garbage within the index structure. I removed it with Vim and bang, the document compiled perfectly to PDF. There have been a lot of discussions about changing the LyX native formula. I'd like to ask that whatever the new format turns out to be, it be at least as easy for a normal intelligence human to manually edit, parse and modify as the current format. XML has been discussed, and the point has been made that if XML is done with an eye toward manual parsing and editing, it can be as easy to parse and edit in Vim as the current native format. While that's obviously true, we all know that from a human parsing viewpoint, XML can quickly get out of control. One look at any OpenOffice file confirms this. XML has the capability to make one paragraph depend on several different XML subtrees. If authored that way, for all practical purposes human manual parsability and editability is destroyed. Also, the XML spec itself does not recognize lines, so it would be up to the LyX tools to properly assign lines to nodes and vice versa. Otherwise it would be impossible to write LyX creation and modification scripts, at least without a big, ugly XML parser. I'm pretty sure all the current developers understand all this because you regularly tweak LyX from editors yourselves. I am concerned, however, that future LyX developers will say "Hey, LyX is XML and to do our jobs correctly we need to just worry about valid XML, not linefeeds. On that day, a great deal of user power is lost. So, as usual, I"m pleading that as you decide on future native formats, you make the new formats as human parsable and editable as the current version. Thanks SteveT
