Steve, On 2018-11-05 23:45 , Steve Litt wrote: > On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 00:36:13 +0200 Dr Eberhard Lisse <nos...@lisse.na> > wrote: > >> Steve, >> >> I fundamentally disagree about the relevance. >> >> LyX is a front end for LaTeX, not a document format. And it is a >> FANTASTIC front end, which can be twsited to do a lot of things :-)-O > > Sure, but LaTeX isn't the only game in town the way it was 10 years > ago (unless you took Docbook seriously a decade ago). Most new books > are ePubs or derivative mobis or whatever.
Yes, maybe, or not. But I want to use LaTeX. Not only because I have been since 35 years or so, but because it still produces the best quality output form my purposes, which are letters, reports and the like, but not books. >> pandoc can produce an epub from (reasonable) LaTeX (exported from >> LyX), which kindlegen can translate into mobi. > > Yeah. I've had hundreds of people recommend pandoc and XSLT and the > like. Have *you* ever successfully used pandoc to create HTML or ePub > or mobi formatted to your desires? If you have, you're one in five > hundred. Everyone recommends Pandoc, but finding people who have used > it is like finding a needle in a haystack, and when you find such > people and ask them how to do the conversion, they point you to > Internet sites with procedures that make installing Gentoo or Arch a > one click process. I haven't written a book yet. But pandoc is very powerful and I have been tweaking its templates to generate (LyX) reports and/or (LyX) beamer presentations from MindMaps. Using a bash script or a Makefile. > By the way, same thing goes for Asciidoc, Asciidoctor, Markdown, and > Multimarkdown. Evvverybody recommends it, but few have used it to > make books in which the author declares and uses styles. As the above workflow uses Markdown, I am starting to experiment with (Dragon) dictating Markdown, to later mess with the thing in LyX. > >> For LaTeX there is lwarp at >> >> https://ctan.org/pkg/lwarp >> >> which also looks interesting. > > I wish I had a dime for every hour I spent, on solutions to this > problems, that "look interesting". 99% of them turn out to be > converters whose first step is to convert your styles into appearance, > guaranteeing garbaged up output. Keep on trucking. Or was that trying? One of these days s/looks interesting/works/ :-)-O >> XML would be a great step, and not only for epub. But that would be >> a fundamental change, and who's going to do it? > > And that's where the rubber meets the road. Look back to the thread, > starting on 7/22/2008, subject "Progress on the MS Word to LyX > conversion". In that thread, against my warnings, by the way, several > top Lyx developers promised an XML native format for LyX 1.7x. Not > pidgeon XML. Not almost XML. Not halfassed XML. They promised XML. > With a DTD, no less. > > Now my position was that XML is much harder to parse with Unix core > utilities, so I was against it. But at least I figured that if it > went XML, I could find an XML parser to do what I had been doing. > With much more difficulty. But doable. > > But they went only half way, harming the inherent coreutils > parsability without enabling the file to be processed by an XML > parser. > > If memory serves me, 1.6 already had some XML-ish changes to the > native format, I don't remember a 1.7, and 2.0 introduced the pidgeon > XML we know today. Over 7 years have elapsed since 2.0's > introduction, over a decade has elapsed since it was decided to have a > well formed XML native format validated with a DTD. You do understand the concept of Open Source, right? If only for Caveat Emptor? > Retina display and iOS and all this Apple compatibility is nice, but > I'll repeat, it's not 2008 and PDF is no longer the only game in town, > and I think priority should be placed on finishing what was started in > July of 2008. So you are joing the development team? el
