It is a not-so-rare situation that the user needs to add -shell-escape as an option to the LaTeX converter that is being used, in order to compile a document.
We can't ship documents that compile out-of-the-box without the user
doing the dance of figuring out how to add the option. The average user
does not feel comfortable modifying converter options, and further they
need to (or at least should) remember to remove the option after they
are done compiling a document.
It would be nice to make the process of temporarily using -shell-escape
more user-friendly.
One solution is to add a set of converters, one for each LaTeX flavor,
and then to specify the "needauth" flag for those converters. It would
be unfortunate to have
LaTeX (pdflatex) (shell-escape) -> PDF (pdflatex-se)
as a completely different converter from
LaTeX (pdflatex-shell-escape) -> PDF (pdflatex)
An alternative is to recognize that really this should be a document
setting. We could have a document option "shell-escape" (or a more
user-friendly name) in Document > Settings > Formats, which does the
following if checked: If an export is chosen that uses a LaTeX
converter, -shell-escape is added to the options.
Of course, for this approach we need to be careful. A malicious user
could just set the document setting and then do bad stuff. So LyX
would need to confirm once that the user trusts the document (using
the needauth framework?).
Any thoughts?
Scott
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
