LyX friends,
I have been corresponding with someone at the American Geophysical Union
about their LaTeX support. You may know that AGU publishes a number of
journals, the best known of which is no doubt JGR, the Journal of
Geophysical Research.
AGU makes available a number of style files (yes, 2.09) to allow the
preparation of manuscripts. Unfortunately, no support for BibTeX. Also,
no support (really) for LaTeX2e. The inimitable Patrick Daly has thus
given unto us a package called AGUPLUS, which fixes both problems, and
then some.
Now my AGU correspondent (who told me about AGUPLUS, btw) reported that
AGU is preparing to launch a new package for LaTeX2e soon. This would be
an opportunity for us to get LyX in the door with a MAJOR "customer".
I was told that AGU has had problems with their contributors; many
dislike to use LaTeX because the mark-up is experienced as difficult
(which it undoubtedly is, compared to WYSIWYG). Yet, the AGU technical
people are committed to LaTeX also because it makes it easy to produce
abstracts in (decent) HTML (or even whole journals? I'm not sure.) LyX
would be just the thing for them.
I studied the AGU LaTeX format, and noticed immediately what I think
will be the biggest problem (there are a number of smaller ones as
well). The floats provided are
figure figure*
table table*
plate plate*
planotable planotable*
See the problem? Floats are hardwired in LyX currently (1.0). Of course
this could be worked around with ERT, but... what about making floats
user-definable like they are in LaTeX? How hard?
What are the plans for the new LyX version? This is an opportunity
really (how many of you are publishing in AGU journals btw?). What do
you think?
Enjoy,
Martin Vermeer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
