Hi ,
I had brought up an issue on the LyX users list, see the quoted text
below; meanwhile I've looked around for some more info on this, and
felt I could make some suggestions here. Looking at Bug 2419, I see
the rationale for having self-contained export from LyX to LaTeX that
includes the matching graphics formats as well. But I think in order
for LyX to retain its full customizability it is also essential to
have a pure LaTeX export function that leaves included graphics
untouched.
Right now, both "plain and PDF"-latex exports run additional scripts
that attempt to provide not only the LaTeX file but also the
corresponding graphics files. But those kinds of scripts are not the
core functionality of a LaTeX export - they are added sugar. If they
have to be in the export menu, they should certainly not REPLACE the
original pure LaTeX file export; they should be offered IN ADDITION
to it.
I have my own conversion script that calls "lyx --export latex" and
this has been working great up until I switched from LyX 1.3.6 to LyX
1.4.2. It seems that the old latex export functionality should be
easy to restore to the File menu, and obviously it should also be
accessible as a command-line option to preserve backwards-
compatibility with LyX 1.3.x. I could imagine ways in which I can
protect my lyx files from having their graphics includes processed by
LyX export, but I imagine there must be many other users that will be
missing the plain latex export, so I think it's much more reasonable
to restore that function to LyX than to ask users to adapt to the
new, more invasive export functions.
Regarding the new pdflatex export, it is in fact broken. I would
suggest stripping the file suffix ONLY if the included graphics are
non-compliant with pdflatex. Right now, ALL suffixes are stripped,
even if they are .pdf or .png etc. There is absolutely no need for
that if the export is explicitly designed for pdflatex. In fact, it
creates the potential for unintended consequences, as the following
example illustrates:
Say you have two files,
picture.png
picture.pdf
and they contain different information. In a LyX document, I can
include both in different places, and they will also appear with
their respective different information when the document is typeset.
But now when I try to export to LaTeX using the "pdflatex Export" in
LyX, I get a .tex file that has only the PNG file in it, duplicated
in the place where the PDF file was intended to be. That's because
pdflatex thinks png it "better" than PDF, an opinion that in this
case is not only presumptuous but also wrong (because the PDF file
could have a totally different picture in it).
I guess one could file a bug report for the pdflatex Export function,
but the root of the problem in my opinion is that there needs to be a
bare LaTeX export that gives the user a hook to write their own
conversion scripts in order to handle the graphics the way they deem
best.
Jens
I just discovered one more thing that I find strange about LyX
1.4.2 - I'll explore this some more, but my initial impression is
not favorable: when exporting to LaTeX, we now have the choice of
plain versus pdflatex-versions. In both cases, LyX tries to be too
clever for its own good - this rings warning bells, because it's
one of the reasons why I don't use MS Word:
(a)
When you do the plain export with a LyX document designed for
pdflatex, LyX quietly (without warning!) goes through the graphics
in my document and creates EPS versions of them, if they were in a
format that pdflatex understands but latex doesn't. Fortunately it
warns you if a pre-existing EPS file is about to be overwritten in
the process (and of course that means the user has to watch the
export process carefully and constantly answer warning dialogs).
When I choose Export > "plain LaTeX" I don't want LyX to export
tons of EPS files in the process - that's not very "plain" to me.
(b)
The other way around, when choosing pdflatex export, LyX doesn't
leave my graphics includes alone either! In that case, it silently
(again without warning!) strips off all the graphics file suffixes.
When I have multiple formats of a figure that are all suitable for
pdflatex, I want to be sure that the format I specify in the suffix
gets chosen. LyX doesn't seem to grant me that freedom any more.
Given that all this was not an issue in LyX 1.3.x, I would be very
much in favor if one could at least turn these "features" off.
Maybe there's a way and I just haven't found it yet...
