On 4/05/2011 9:59 p.m., Liviu Andronic wrote:
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Andrew Parsloe<apars...@clear.net.nz> wrote:
Yes, but it would be nice to be able to sum a table in LyX without having to
fire up Gnumeric or Excel or whatever.
It sure would.
(To take matters to extremes, you
could even fire up an external wordprocessor and create a pdf or latex
document and import into LyX, but we don't. LyX is so much better and more
fun to work in.)
I understand your concern, but adding true spreadsheet capabilities to
LyX would be a massive undertaking, and something to which some
developers would object. LyX is by design a very flexible beast that
allows you to interact with a huge (and growing) number of external
tools: LaTeX, DocBook, BibTeX, R, Maxima, etc., etc.
As far as I'm concerned, LyX does provide spreadsheet capabilities via
the Gnumeric external material. It allows you to create and maintain
your tables in a mature spreadsheet tool (something that LyX would
never provide natively), and _dynamically_ import the results into
your LyX documents. Personally I couldn't ask for more. (Think of it
as graphics creation: you do not create them in LyX; you use some
external tool to either create a final PDF and import into LyX, or to
dynamically manage via external material).
Cheers
Liviu
Actually I do create graphics in LyX (using PSTricks in a LyX document
that consists entirely of one sometimes big ERT inset). But I take your
point. For a computer with limited memory (1 GB seemed big when I bought
it), where there's a lot of disk activity with multiple programs
running, being able to work in LyX alone would be helpful.
Regards,
Andrew
