On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, Paul E Johnson wrote:
> Since I publicized my blunder with the myHangIndent code not translating
> well with latex2html, I've been doing some background study to
> understand better the mistake. This morning I woke with this question.
>
> Why did the original LyX author create his own layout format? Why didn't
> he use the TeX standard sty or cls style? That way, LyX could use any
> TeX sty or cls files and not have to build that intermediate lyx layout
> representation of it.
Have you tried reading one of those things?
Sure it'd be great if someone did the leg work to get a parser into shape
that understands what's going on in such a file (short of including half
of TeX in LyX). We just need to extract some simple info. We don't care
about glue lengths for example -- we're WYSIWYM not WYSIWYG after all.
> I know there must be a good reason, but the more I try to learn a giant
> style file from the Kluwer publishing company and translate it into a
> lyx book layout, the more I wish I didn't have to do it at all. Since I
> don't know TeX, it is extremely frustrating to translate TeX into LyX,
> which I also don't know....
Yes it seems you have looked ;-)
The best place to start is copy styles that look similar from other
layouts. So long as it looks approximately okay on screen should be a
good first draft. The important stuff is figuring out what are valid user
commands and environments and how LyX should output them.
Some styles/classes are easier to use than others in this regard.
Allan. (ARRae)
