I have to plug emacs for native lyx support. That application is awesome at parsing raw Latex. As Richard said, this is the antithesis of why anyone would use Lyx. I have become a huge fan of seamlessly integrating my latex documents, mostly tables, using the input command and editing the .tex file using emacs. Since there is already excellent Latex editors, I don't understand why it would be desirable for Lyx to incorporate such features.
~Ben On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Richard Heck <rgh...@lyx.org> wrote: > On 06/09/2015 06:13 PM, Scott Kostyshak wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 10:00:25PM +0100, Ricardo Gaspar wrote: >> >>> Hi there, >>> >>> I am a new user of Lyx, but a not a beginner in LaTEX. >>> >> Hi Ricardo, and welcome! It's nice to have a fresh perspective. Please >> keep providing feedback and if you happen to have the time and >> interests, patches or (if you do not enjoy programming) improvements to >> the documentation would be welcome. It's especially useful to receive >> feedback from new users, in my opinion. >> >> I couldn’t find in the internet why Lyx doesn’t allow to edit the source >>> LaTEX file. It would be an awesome feature and could make Lyx a great rival >>> against the other LaTEX editors. >>> I like the simplicity of Lyx and the features it provides, but sometimes >>> I would like to change or add code directly to the source file. >>> >>> Can you please answer this question? Or at least redirect me to a site >>> where I can find it? >>> >> This is an often requested feature. See for example: >> http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/FeaturePoll2#toc10 >> http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/5260 >> >> The basic answer, from what I understand, is simply that it is *very* >> hard to parse LaTeX. LyX has its own format. It can export that format >> to LaTeX very reliably, but it is extremely difficult to make that a >> seamless two-way communication. >> > > Yes, the basic problem is that this is highly non-trivial, though not > impossible, and it isn't > really compatible with the idea behind LyX. Contrary to how it is often > advertised, LyX is > NOT a LaTeX frontend. LaTeX is only one of the formats we natively export > (though by far > the most important). > > The ability to edit the LaTeX would basically involve offering the user > the LaTeX source > for some fragment of text, then running tex2lyx on whatever the user ended > up with, then > replacing the relevant fragment of text witih the result. This is still > harder than it sounds, > since tex2lyx outputs some text (a LyX file, basically), and what we > really need is the data > structure that LyX would create upon reading that file. This could be > done, though, by reading > the new text into a temporary Buffer and doing some kind of cut and paste > behind the scenes. > But there's not really any guarantee that what LyX would export at that > point would actually > be the same as what the user entered: That kind of 'roundtrip' is a goal, > not a reality. > > Alternatively, the LaTeX the user created could become ERT. But then maybe > such a user > should just use LaTeX. > > Richard > >
