Hi all, >From the postings here I saw it's not only me who has a high interest in incorporating non-lyx or not-yet-lyx-compatible applications, in a form that has been made popular by M$'s office products. The most prominent thing I remember was Word Art in Word (I didn't use Word for a very very long time...). You'd insert a Wordart object and you can modify it via dialogs.
A similar functionality would be beneficial to Lyx users. To grab the idea of gnu-plot integration: Imagine you insert a gnu-plot object into Lyx. In a dialog you could have a neat gui to edit and configure the plot, or just a text-editor/preview combo, whatever the developers have time to implement. Similarly you can easily imagine to incorporate gimp logo effects, or conveniently (e.g. without tex syntax) editing chemtex insets. Code-to-Lyx converters? Gnumeric support (well ok that may require some bonobo stuff but might be quite powerful)? Querying an SQL Table to integrate into reports? Comfortably editing Chess diagrams/FEN Positions? Rendering of small UTF-8 portions without changing the encoding for the sake of language learning material or to include foreign names in a native spelling? I think the easiest way to do this is using Python as a scripting language. The lyx-side interface would be relatively simple-minded. The only requirement for a plugin would be to have a method to serialize and deserialize an object to a lyx-file-compatible format and to output tex/lyx code. Optional is a gui dialog and a preview bitmap/restrains. Instead of a preview bitmap it may also simply provide a string to be displayed on a button. That's all. Using Python for this has a few benefits. You need not relink Lyx to test your plugin code, you need not even restart Lyx at all. It's easy to learn, fast to deploy, and follows the guru-student principle of latex and lyx in general (a bigger userbase with little knowledge using the layouts of somebody who knows latex/lyx). Using SWIG and python's distutils it isn't really that difficult to interface a python plugin to c++ code that implements the real plugin functionality, if there is no way to load dynamic libraries. The former is even easier to port to Windows if needed, though it seems strange at first hand). Well maybe it's the wrong time to start an effort like that. I'd just like to hear what lyx comunity has to say about it. I Found Lyx to be a very productive writing tool, and my point is, that a Python scripting interface will improve on this. Thanks for reading and best regards, Andreas
