On Sun, May 12, 2002 at 04:59:09PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote: > [...] In contrast, I believe LyX to have the necessary infrastructure for > that kind of functionality.
At least partially... I believe so, too. > [...] Even in those areas where LyX _does_ know its things > (like in math formulas), some people might not be adverse to having > an option to let LyX replace its own rendition of them by a true > LaTeX one as long as one is not actively editing the formula. Actually I have been playing with this idea after I've seen your preview-LaTeX package in action. I am fairly sure that can be done at least for mathed by using a mechanism similar to what we already do there for macro editing [Macro with arguments change their appearance to allow editing parameters when the cursor is "in" the macro. Probably not the best piece of user-interaction, but it "works"]. Additionally I'd probably allow "plain LaTeX" editing, too, to accomodate people who'd like to use the "hard way" (or want to use "unusual" stuff). So in the end we'd have four cases: (a) cursor outside an inset, inset rendered by LyX (as we do now) (b) cursor outside an inset, inset rendered by LaTeX (your proposal) (c) cursor inside an inset, inset rendered by LyX (as we do now) (d) cursor inside an inset, inset rendered as plain LaTeX source. (a) and (c) is what we have right now, (b) and (d) is what preview-LaTeX does right now. Toggling between ( (a) and (b) ) and ( (c) and (d) ) could be done by some hotkey, so "the whole is more than sum of the parts"... > While most of the _determination_ of the previewable parts would probably > already be done by LyX itself, the actual extraction (with the help of > the preview environment provided by the style) could still be > accomplished using that package. I would be glad to be of assistance > if particular options or general advice would be necessary in order to > generate a version suitable for working with LyX. I'd basically need a _fast_ way to get some rendered bitmap out of a string like $a^2+b^2$. That's it. The "obvious" solution would be to create some temp.tex, run LaTeX on it, convert the dvi. I don't know how 'fast' this is, though. I suppose preview-latex can help here already, but I am not sure how far it helps... > Of course, since preview-latex is GPLed software, you would be free to > incorporate and read all of it that you want into LyX, anyhow. You know, there is always some difference between "incorporatin GPLed software" and "incorporating GPLed software with active help of its author"... Andre' PS: > Again, I apologize for the intrusion on this list, but hope that it might > incite a few of you to look into a particular way of improving LyX in an > area I personally would estimate to be well worth the work to be > invested. Actually I did not expect /you/ to show up on this list with such an offer of assistance. You are certainly welcome here ;-) -- Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one. (T. Jefferson)
