On Mar 8, 2012, at 2:21 AM, Rainer M Krug wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1
> I would love to agree, but round-trip is what is needed most of the > time. An import word2lyx is perfect, but in most cases only half the > story. I would use it extensively if the round trip is possible. > Obviously, we can not deal with the word-editing side (whatever > program is used for that). I'm sympathetic to this point. I understand that having a way to go from one to the other is important. I've deliberately avoided creating an export to Word option, though, because it would essentially require that I recode large portions of LyX in Python. I'm resistant to doing that because it's a a lot of extra code to maintain. There are already two implementations of LyX document parsing libraries: eLyXer and that found in LyX itself. Adding a third and trying to keep it in some sort of synchronization would be a huge pain. I'm looking into using eLyXer for Word conversion from LyX, but that is lesser priority than making Word import work correctly. (At least at the moment.) If there is someone (maybe Alex or another eLyXer dev) who would be interest in collaborating and handling the export part, I'd be happy to coordinate with them so that we're able to round-trip. >> People will take this as a promise and complain that it does not >> work well enough. > > Well - one could state that the round-trip works for MS word version > abcd, and other versions can / will / might cause problems which are > not in our hands. I've already taken that position. I'm willing to work with Word versions 2007 and 2010, and only files saved in docx. I'm not going to even try and parse doc binary files. word2lyx is about a 1000 lines of code. The doc parsing libraries I've looked at are easily 10 times that long. Python has excellent libraries for parsing XML that do nearly all the heavy lifting. I would have to write my own parsing library for doc. >> The difference of structure between word and lyx are too important >> to be able to work in a word<->LyX collaboration IMO. > > There are obviously basic difference in how LyX and word are viewing > documents, and these lead to principal differences how the files are > saved. > > But I am thinking that if one can import a docx file into LyX, one > should be able to do the reverse. And one should be able to define a > robust subset of features which are maintained when doing a round-trip. > In the same way that certain features are not converted in word2lyx, > lyx2word would also only support a subset of features which are > exported. But if these subsets include the most important features > used in the editing process on both sides, a round trip should be > possible. I agree that it is possible, but there's a lot of code needed to make it work correctly. It's also a larger problem set that I want to right now. Once I've got the Word import working, including track changes and notes (and probably maths, too), I'll be more willing to come back and take a look at it. But as I said earlier, if there's someone who would like to jump on board and work with Word export (lyx2word), I'll be happy to coordinate and work with them, too. Cheers, Rob
