On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Hal Kierstead <hal.kierst...@icloud.com> wrote: > > On Oct 26, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > >> On Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:49:13 +0200 >> Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <lasgout...@lyx.org> wrote: >> >>> 25/10/2013 02:37, Ken Springer: >>>> Just a question, does viable equate something that will be >>>> successful in the long run? >>> >>> It is already successful. We have users, LyX continues to advance, >>> although at a frustratingly slow pace these days. >> >> LOL, how can you expect fast advances when the LyX pretty much became >> perfect in 2004? I mean, really, name me one serious thing it's >> missing. At this point we're down to more efficient hotkeys and a more >> complete outline mode. >> >> Thanks, >> >> SteveT >> >> Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ >> Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance > OK, I will take up the challenge. I love LyX, and use it for everything, > even my private notes, EXCEPT when collaborating. Nobody else I work with > uses it. Even if I write the first draft in LyX, and my coauthors do not > change the front matter, I cannot convert their file to good LyX. If this > were possible I think my coauthors would be trying out LyX and quickly > converting. I cannot even get undergraduates or graduate students to give it > a try.
Hi Hal, This is a common request and I understand your frustration. It would be great if LyX were able to perfectly import LaTeX. I would like to see this and I have the impression that many developers would like to see this. The reason that importing LaTeX into LyX is far from perfect is simply that it's hard. It's very hard to parse LaTeX because of all of the possible commands and packages. I'm actually quite impressed and thankful that it works as well as it does. The good news is that it's getting better with each release. The following lists the fifteen bugs that will be fixed in LyX 2.1 related to importing LaTeX: http://www.lyx.org/trac/query?status=accepted&status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&description=~&reporter=~&component=tex2lyx&summary=~&keywords=~fixedintrunk&col=id&col=summary&col=keywords&col=reporter&col=status&col=type&col=severity&desc=1&order=id > I should at least be able to convert tex files produced by LyX back into the > original version of LyX, even if it takes some ugly hacks like adding extra > data to insure the conversion. I can see where you're coming from but I personally don't agree with this. I never think ugly hacks are the answer. And even if this were done, maybe things would work better if your coauthors did not change any single LaTeX command and only changed the text, but the moment they change one thing (even adding a simple \textbf), this can be a huge deal to the parser and not even ugly hacks will save us there. I don't know of the following analogy is good, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. Think about a linguistic language translator. Translating is difficult. Google translator does an incredible job in my opinion, but even then there is no round trip. (The following is a little OT but it works within the analogy so I'm going with it.) In response to many who think that the goal of LyX developers is for everyone to use LyX, I don't think the answer is to try to convert everyone to speak English. Multilingualism is great and the world would be pretty boring if everyone spoke the same language. In my opinion the best thing to do is to improve tex2lyx little by little. If you find a bug, see if it's reported (look for component tex2lyx) and if not please report it. Thanks for your thoughts, Scott
