Hi Paul Paul A. Rubin wrote: > John Pye wrote: > >> >> If I make a DOT->PNG converter and use that, it works fine. So there >> is nothing wrong with LyX's ability to make some form of file >> conversion here. It fails when I attempt to configure a conversion >> from DOT to PDF. >> > > Works fine for me here. Keep in mind that there are at least three > PDF file formats defined within LyX, because different compilation > methods (ps2pdf, pdflatex, dvipdfm) have different requirements. On > my box those are designated pdf, pdf2 and pdf3 respectively, and I'm > pretty sure that's standard across installations. If you create a > converter from DOT to pdf3, say, and then use View -> PDF (pdflatex) > to see the output (which is creating pdf2 output), presumably > something will break.
I tried this many times but no success. I am aware of the pdflatex (etc) issue. It is not called 'pdf3' on my system, it is called 'PDF (pdflatex)'. That is the standard on Fedora and Ubuntu systems, if not elsewhere, so I don't think you're right about 'pdf3' etc. This converter system is way too delicate IMHO: if you get it wrong, you get minimal and rather cryptic error messages. It's also impossible for someone to help to diagnose a problem, because you can't just "sent me your config file" (AFAIK) and you can't tell what stuff is different on my system compared to your system. FWIW, I think that rather than an all-powerful GUI for editing converters, file formats, etc, these things should be stored in flat platform-specific configuration files that can be packaged for distribution as 'plugins' eg a set of LyX configuration files + linux package dependences = support for Graphviz in LyX. This would take the voodoo out of the job of getting LyX working with various different file formats, and allow end-users to make use of *the tools they know already* in order to get extra features working with LyX. I say this, but I'm not going to come and help, so you best ignore me here :-) Cheers JP
