>>>>> "Matej" == Matej Cepl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Hello Matej, Matej> Hi, I have occasionally guy (Bruce D'Arcus from Matej> bibliographic.openoffice.org) some of my thoughts about LyX and Matej> generally about writing and I thought that you may be Matej> interested as well (it is slightly edited -- I do not need to Matej> explain to you what LyX is). Just to be sure, I really do not Matej> want to ignite flame war, I have been using LyX for more than Matej> five years and all my work is dependent on it. However, I have Matej> just some fears about its future, which I would love to have Matej> answered. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'll try to answer to some of your concerns. Matej> While working with LyX I have unfortunately met some of its Matej> limitations and I am getting more and more frustrated, because Matej> I feel that there is actually so little what I really want (see Matej> below) missing. Matej> 1) Although there is a pretty good crowd of LyX users, there is Matej> too small pool of actual developers (BTW, I am not the one of Matej> them either, because I just cannot spend a time to learn C++ Matej> and code in it) -- just some six of them in fact AFAIK. That's sadly true. Matej> 2) So although LyX probably cannot be considered dead yet, its Matej> development is even slower than global warming and there are Matej> many issues from small to big which are just not addressed. I never thought of LyX as 'dead', but it may be that I cannot face the truth :) I agree though that things are not going very well currently now. Matej> Moreover, the program is in the state of perpetual rewrite and Matej> for couple of years users have been calmed down by saying, that Matej> when this cycle of complete rewrite will be finished Matej> programmers of the code will address our wishes and concerns. I Matej> guess most of users gave up on hoping that their concerns will Matej> be ever addressed, as I did. I am not saying that these Matej> rewrites are not necessary, I have really no clue about Matej> underlying programming, but I just do not feel that my concerns Matej> are addressed at all and LyX is IMHO becoming to be Matej> "programmers' project" rather than "users' project", if you Matej> know what I mean. I think there is some truth in the fact that LyX tends to be a "programmers' project". For our defense, I would say that the rewrites we have to do are also to blame for the period when it was a "users' project" in a bad way, which meant that it had no real foundation to build on. Also, we have a growing interest for the native OSX and Windows versions, and I hope this is going to help attract other people to help. Matej> 3) Moreover, one of the projects which was silently dropped and Matej> will be addressed probably sometimes around the time orange Matej> farms move from Florida to Boston (or from Spain to my native Matej> Czechia) is support for scripting of LyX. Indeed. Matej> So users like myself cannot address themselves some small Matej> issues in the program itself -- for example, LyX doesn't have Matej> Transpose Characters function (Ctrl-T in Emacs) and there is no Matej> way how to emulate that. Kind of WYHIWYH (What You Have Is What Matej> You Have -- and that's it). char-transpose has been available since 1.2.0, I think. Of course, this does not mean the problem is not real. Actually, I would interested to know what your other pet peeves wrt LyX are, besides the fact that it does not do scripting and you are afraid it may not be there in a few years. I think the situation with the file format is not too bad now that we have lyx2lyx, which can translate backwards and forwards from any version to another. From what I read, DocBook support will be much improved in 1.4.0 (I do not use that so I cannot really comment). And the new tex2lyx program will really improve on LaTeX importation. Of course these last two point are for when we manage to release 1.4.0, and this release has proven hard to get through the gates. I will deliberately avoid to mention features that are now only on the roadmap, since they are just vapour now. Actually, I would be interested to know what your other griefs with LyX are. I know there are a lot of problems, but you mention only a few that are relevant to LyX in your message. JMarc
