Rob Oakes wrote:
Dear Jürgen and other LyX Developers,
Thank you very much for the kind welcome. Pursuant to your advice, I have
gone through and tried to develop my thoughts on a few features that I would
be excited to develop and add to LyX. Because of dummy-layouts and a few
other graphics I wasn't able to send it via e-mail. However, you can find
the full proposal at:
http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/03/04/perfect-tool
or a PDF version at:
http://www.oak-tree.us/stuff/LyX-Proposal.pdf
Interesting.
Here's a quick summary: LyX is one of the easiest and best ways to leverage
the power of LaTeX. Unfortunately, most of its features are geared document
preparation. It would be wonderful if LyX included a robust outliner or
more visual way to interact with the structure of the document (though the
outline view in the 1.6 series is an excellent start). Scrivener, a program
for Mac OS X (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) and Semantik
(http://www.freehackers.org/~tnagy/kdissert.html) includes such tools.
The most important features of the expanded outline system would be:
1.) Easy rearrangement (drag and drop) of outline items.
Shouldn't be too hard to add. Movement of items is supported, all you
need is user-friendly dragging.
2.) Inclusion of a summary field (which is not part of the document text)
and allows for graphical manipulation of the document.
While not part of the document, I think it ought to be stored in the
document file. Similiar to note insets.
3.) Ties between the outline items and blocks of text in the draft.
The current outliner is perfectly tied because it is the document text
you see. The outliner is not stored in the document or anywhere else, it
is displayed directly from document data. The obvious advantage is
that it cannot possibly get "out of sync" with the document - there
being nothing to "keep up to date".
Your summary field would have to be tied in somehow. I think it should
be stored as an attribute of whatever section/chapter/part it belongs
to. That way, all the existing ways of moving stuff around (including
such things as cut&paste of whole chapters) will work for summary stuff
too. Of course the summary don't have to show in the main window, it can
be a outline-only thing.
4.) Outline data would remain as part of the original LyX document, it would
not be exported into other document types (LaTeX, HTML, etc.)
While none of these ideas are original, my thinking has congealed increasing
frustrated with the aforementioned Scrivener. While its creative tools are
wonderful, the word processor is too underpowered to be of much practical
use. Without a fully featured word processor, the outliner and corkboard
are just nifty gimmicks.
Yet, they are extremely useful gimmicks. As someone who spends more than
50% of his productive hours writing grants, papers, or proposals; I can say
that a robust outliner and visual system for interacting with the structure
of complex documents would greatly simplify many of my daily routine. I was
able to get a rather substantial outline for a book completed in Scrivener,
before needing to move it to LyX. I would have greatly preferred to work
exclusively from LyX.
Does anyone have additional thoughts or ideas how the technical
implementation might look? Are there currently plans to implement such a
system? Have similar features been discussed and dismissed in the past as
being unrealistic or impractical?
Nothing has been dismissed; the existing outliner is popular, and
further improvements are possible. The biggest problem is probably that
someone has to do the job.
Helge Hafting