Dear LyX developers, in my post "Import and export to many formats..." [1] sent in the lyx-users mailing list, Helge Hafting replied as seen below. His text covers everything (?) and very precise.
My opinion about LyX's import/export capabilities is to super-compress Helge's words, keep the positive stuff and replace/alter the text in the "Features" web-page [2] that currently leaves the impression that everything works out of the box. For the records: I can't imagine myself working under M$' disorientating environment (and I hope I'll never be forced to do so). However, the key to get more users isn't only to self-improve LyX. It's also to make it really cross-platform and interoperable. This will attract a _lot_ more users than expected. I hope that you see my "sceptical point of view" than just say "another complain from a simple user...". Thank you for your attention, Nikos --- Helge's detailed reply: /--------------------------------------------------------------------/ The conversions depends on external software. This must be installed before conversion is possible. Some conversions can be done in several ways, with different programs. Some programs do a better job than others, so you might get bad results if all you have is the worst program. Do not expect all the conversions to yield good results in all cases. Most of the formats you can export to, is only partially compatible with LyX. So the converted document will at best be different, and at worst be useless. Conversion to latex is about the only conversion that always works perfectly. Conversions to pdf, dvi and postscript goes through latex and is normally perfect. But documents using special features may fail in some of these conversions. For example, dvi does not support pstricks. All other formats have less than perfect conversions. ASCII obviously looses most of the formatting, as it doesn't support fonts and images. But then, nobody expects more from ASCII. Not all features are supported in HTML, so some things may be missing. Still, LyX can be ok for writing html if you avoid some features. opendocument/rtf/word is particularly troublesome. The three are compatible, and therefore all have the same problems. This is a word processor format with a simpler feature set than LyX, so a perfect conversion will never be possible. In particular, any such conversion will loose the good line and page breaking and the hyphenation that LyX does so well. After conversion, a document can merely look like a word document, not better. Also, this converter is far from finished. Much better conversion to word is _possible_, but it looks like nobody/few is interested in working on that for free. Developers tend to want to improve LyX itself rather than the converters, removing the need for word rather than adding compatibility. Helge Hafting /--------------------------------------------------------------------/ --- [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg79685.html and http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg79699.html [2] http://www.lyx.org/Features
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