Guenter Milde wrote:
On 2009-02-05, Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
Guenter Milde wrote:
In my view, to use LaTeX as exchange format,
LyX development should
a) concentrate on an improved
LyX -> LaTeX -> LyX
cycle (with the aim to get this round-trip lossless) and
b) encourage development/improvement of LaTeX converters (to/from
OOffice, HTML, reStructuredText) that emphasise preserving the
semantic over visual appearance.
Anyone thinking of doing this kind of thing should probably look at
plastex, which provides a sort of LaTeX parser written in Python. That
would pretty easily give you one direction.
In my view LateX is too specialized and complicated for an interchange
format. reStructuredText or any other simple markup language would be
just fine IMHO.
But LaTeX is "feature complete", while reStructuredText is even missing
math support (not to speak of paragraph alignment, tables,
citations or a glossary).
Yes, to me, that's a deal breaker as far as using ReST goes. And I don't
really see that their development goals will ever lead to a situation
where ReST is feature complete, in that sense. So my own view, for what
it's worth, is that a greatly improved LaTeX<-->ODT converter is needed,
one that "preserves semantics", or else a direct LyX<-->ODT converter is
needed. There seem to be some existing python tools for reading and
writing ODF, so those could perhaps be used.
rh
