> I came across Lyx, and I am very curios to know why the 'lyx' file > format is not 'tex'.
First of all, because LyX isn't meant to be bound to TeX in any special way. It's a general, high-level editor that supports some constructs that are not gracefully supported by the tex format, at least not natively or not in an obvious way. And LyX doesn't necessarily produce TeX output only. It also does docbook, for example. Secondly, because the TeX format is not a format but a programming language essentially and same document output can be obtained in many different ways. In order to do a generic TeX parser one would need to reimplement the core of TeX, essentially. In the unix world reimplementing existing tools that work fine is a big no-no ;) Generally speaking generating tex is easier than reading it back. Then one can argue that only some well-defined subset of 'tex' could be supported. That's what's already happening as far as equations are concerned: they are stored as raw tex/latex IIRC. > I have looked over a 'lyx' file, and it seems to > me closer to RTF than anything else. From my bystander point of view I guess the meandering path that led to current lyx format is that of: making the parser unmanageable, some poor soul untangling the parser, and then making the format easier to parse so that said sould wouldn't be so poor in the future, with such cycle repeated often over the years :) Cheers, Kuba Ober
