On Tue, 2 May 2000, Dekel Tsur wrote:
> On Tue, May 02, 2000 at 06:06:55PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote:
> > That's what pybliographer, barracuda and tkbib among others are all for.
> > It would be nice if they could insert multiple references however I think
> > they only insert one at a time at the moment.
>
> I'm aware of these programs, but I think it will be easier to use my proposed
> citation popup, than external programs:
> 1. You need more keyboard/mouse operations when using an external program.
> 2. You can't edit existing citations with an external program.
I'd rather we improved the integration of external programs than try to
duplicate their capabilities into LyX. It should be possible using XTL in
LyX and some corresponding externalization support in the external
programs to get/set anything we can change internally. In this case it's
only a string of keys though so there isn't a need for XTL here.
What we do need though is support in the LyXServer for get/setting more
stuff. In this case it'd be handy to be able to push instructions to the
external bibliography utility to display a string of keys from a given
citation. We could even set things up so that C-o opened the external
utility's dialog with the appropriate data instead of our own dialog.
Extend this idea further and you'll quickly see that we'd be able to
replace most of LyX's internal capabilities with external scripts and
utilities. This would also make it possible to easily extend LyX's
capabilities -- provided we can dynamically extend the LyXServer (probably
via a file/s formatted to match LyXServer commands with actions and data).
Allan. (ARRae)
