On 09/06/2009 06:40 AM, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
I've thought about this problem, too, and your suggestion makes some sense. Another option would be to create "dummy" formats, which would be pretty much like the ones we have now, but would not be visible to the user. So the thought would be, we'd have a single format pdf, and "subformats" pdf-1, pdf-2, etc, for each of the ways there are to get pdf output. These would be tied to converters, as in your proposal, and I suppose they could even be named things like "pdf-pdflatex".There's one major obstacle that holds the use of multiple alternative converters for a given output format: the LyX conversion chain allows only one converter per output format (thus, we have the odd pdf{2-4} formats). I think it would be wrong to add a new output format for each alternative converter, so my idea would be to introduce some kind of "via" parameter that can optionally be taken into account. Then, we would be able not only to request a converter "from - to" (as is now), but we could also request a converter "from - to - via". The "via" parameter would be basically just a unique identifier for a converter. This would allow us to drop the duplicated file formats and replace "buffer-view pdf2" by "buffer-view pdf pdflatex", for instance. If the via argument is empty, the default converter for the given format would be used.What do you think?
The only advantage I can see to this is that it might help with chains longer than a single converter.
rh
