I've messed with Lyx, and LaTeX, trying to get more control.
The biggest problem with Latex is it seems all the packages are written by
different people, and some just do NOT work together well, nor is their macro
syntax compatible in some cases.
That said, that makes LyX autogenerating LaTeX content very painful.
Well, I found a European firm who produces their own bundle of TeX macros,
and these guys do a LOT of professional work. The documents they produce are
incredible, and the macro package, ConTeXt, is internally consistent, very
powerful, and clean.
EXAMPLE...
LyX generates LaTex for only set of Tabular macros, but the 'default' tables
are kinda wonky. The other sets, well, they need to be currently typed in by
hand, and they are in seperate packages. It's a royal mess in Latex. In the
future, Lyx would have to support all variants to support all the table
kinds. ConTexT has all that functionality, and more, bundled cleanly into
it's own tables.
ConTeXt is free, and open, and consistent, and has hooks directly into
METAPOST and other goodies. It has support for creating interactive PDF
files, and even spitting out HTML.
This internal consistency, and power, would be useful for a editor like Lyx,
cleaning up some of the muck I find right now in LaTex.
LaTex has umpteen jillion Tabular macro packages for different solutions.
All the ones I looked at, can be done easily and cleanly in ConTeXt.
Please check this out. It may make a better backend for LyX than the mess
that is LaTeX.
Check out their interactive PDF manuals too, typeset with their system...
Wow.
http://www.ntg.nl/context/document.htm
The ones labeled "Pap" are designed for printable output. The ones labeled
"Scr" are interactive PDFs, both output from the same source file
-Daniel
