Slashdot Mirror
LyX Joins the Google Summer of Code 2013
Hamburg writes "LyX joined this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2013) as a mentoring organization. The LaTeX based open-source GUI LyX has been accepted to the GSoC for the first time. With LyX one can start using LaTeX without being used to 'program' documents. So it's an important entry point to the (La)TeX world, and a bridge between GUI word processors and LaTeX. This is a great opportunity for its development, now student developers can get financial support for contributing new features: successful contributions will earn a stipend of 5000 USD for the student and 500 USD for the organization, in this case the LyX project, who provides mentors to the students. There are already many project ideas, for example a GUI for editing layouts, a presentation mode, EPUB export, an outliner tool for intuitive writing, retina screen (HiDPI) support, and interactive concurrent editing. Would you like to take part, or do you have further ideas for improvements or features? Send your proposals to the lyx-devel mailing list, or simply comment here, what can be suggested to the LyX mentors."
As I wrote on here on TeX.SE, an interface allowing to use to online compilers would be great. So we could have a slim LyX installation while being able to use a maintained up-to-date TeX distribution instead of installing gigabytes locally on each computer. For example the open source LaTeX web API CLSI could be used.
I'm currently using LYX to write my dissertation report, it does a good job of hiding the latex for basic structures, and you can press ctrl+L at any time if you wish to insert raw latex. My only issue I've had using LYX actually lies with the listings package for latex which isn't LYXs fault. (The listings packages syntax highlighting functionality doesn't easily support the highlighting of the '' in XML syntax without various hacks which temperamental results at best). Although LYX could benefit from a dedicated editor for generating listings highlighting code for the latex preamble I suppose, however it would be a shame to do this without improving the listings package first.
EPUB output!
I'm like many other professionalls a "lapsed" Fan of LaTeX, truth be told I started with troff -man and the various ancillary tools of the Unix environment
What I recognize is that LaTeX (and the roff familly) enables you to create content that is WAY better looking in many ways.
So why don't I ? in part because I recognized that my investment in *roff was quietly dying off.... so I had to change to something
Partly because Open Office gave me a "free option" so I "could" go to a wysiwyg solution.
And because I started to need to exchange documents with people who would write part of it, and if you are not working in academia this means that the probability of working with LaTeX friendly colleage is quite low.
So what would make me come back...
If I could have an heuristic tool that reads my .odt (or even the .docx version or the .pdf) analyse the structure, and creates a LaTeX document that has the same content but NOT really the same layout but as close as possible the same structure.
There are a couple of tools pdf/odt/word to LaTeX but they all try to convert the original document into LaTeX that looks just like the original document.
What I think would be a game changer would be to have a new document, able to leverage the embedded knowledge in the more common LaTeX templates, and create a tweakable MUCH better looking, new document.
I would then be happy to use LyX as an entry point for WysiWyg tweaking, and finallly jump into emacs to really finalize my document...
I strongly disagree, LyX is not a good editor, it is a great one! :-) It's formulas editing is absolutely unmatched. I have switched to pure LaTeX nowadays, but recommend LyX to any student I know.
A success story from my side: at the university I have used LyX to type down lecture information from a blackboard. I have, of course, shared my pdfs and .lyx files. Later on, even the professor himself has used my documents because he had his lectures written down by hand previously. And I got a part-time job from the said professor, part of the job was to digitalize his lectures. And because he was putting his complete script on a blackboard, I basically got paid for visiting his courses (which I had to visit anyway).
Later on, I have used LyX for my thesis, but even then I have been in the process of switching to raw LaTeX. LyX is somewhat less flexible, but a great entry point to the world of beautiful documents.
I strongly disagree in the other direction... these sorts of editors that get away from LaTeX just make it a million times more confusing later on when you need to do something that is actually difficult, and barely any easier for the things that are simple. It's great if it helps introduce people to LaTeX, but beyond that I view them as a waste of time -- both for using them, and those that expend so much energy developing them instead of something else.
When things go wrong with these types of editors (and the always do, as soon as people decide to do a big, important project) and people ask me for help, I just tell them to install a clean version of LaTeX and use a text editor, because it is easier to explain how than to sort out what went wrong.
But then, I'm an Emacs user, so I'm already crazy, right?
LyX is the fastest interface I have come across for mathematical syntax, due to the great foundations and comprehensive input mapping. It would be lovely to be able to use generally as a notebook, especially if there were some upgrades to the rudimentary CAS (computer algebra system) support included up to V2.
One feature fundamental to this goal is the parsing of respective CAS languages, obviously, in particular multi-line expressions. In the case of Maxima, I experimented with LyX -> LaTeX -> Maxima conversion in manual steps, playing with SnuggleTeX, but apart from requiring generous amounts of scripting being a java library this is not the most straightforward way to interact with LyX or Maxima.
If someone were to start a project to improve on LyX's CAS integration this would interest me greatly and I would look forward to contributing. The idea of ultimately converging to plain-readable interactive scientific documents together with projects like Sage to me is truly exciting, and I hope that LyX's interface can be part of it.
It would be more useful to fix LibreOffice to produce output that looks as good as TeX.
One forgotten approach comes from Interleaf. Most WYSIWYG word processors today show you only the document - the markup is invisible. The old Word Perfect approach, where you could see the markup characters, or the HTML source approach, is too clunky. But Interleaf showed the output text alongside a column of annotation information. So you could see the difference between a tab indent and a paragraph indent, for example. That would be an appropriate way to present fine formatting controls.
This goes beyond typical summer of code but what about adding Framemaker type capabilities to LyX. Right now LyX is a word processor that outputs to TeX. What about an entire document authoring and organizational GUI which used LyX / TeX for the lower level stuff. Pull in DocBook.
"for example a GUI for editing layouts"
This! Latex and Lyx are fabulous as long as there's a class file or style file available for whatever format you need, but the second you're preparing something where there's no existing class file, you're screwed unless you want to spend hours with the Lamport book learning the intricacies - something that by definition Lyx is trying to help users avoid. Most of the time there's even something close to what you want - I ended up digging through the Lamport book when doing my PhD because there was an old, out of date class file available for doctoral theses for my institution, but it needed to be updated to meet changed requirements for filing. A gui allowing me to edit the layout would have saved me a lot of pain.
Dude this is awesome. I use LyX all the time even though I'm perfectly fluent and capable with LaTeX. The immediate feedback you get from it means I can spend less time worrying about syntax and more time thinking about mathematics. I often don't even write on the board or on paper, I just go straight to LyX; I'm fast enough typing in it that it's the same.. plus my notes are instantly typeset beautifully. Also not having to do a makefile to handle the massively convoluted commands to compile LaTeX that uses lots of necessary packages (e.g. BiBTeX) is a huge productivity boost.
LyX does have some failings though. I learned with my thesis that it's not yet ready for a serious long-term multi-document project. Some of the LaTeX details are insufficiently exposed, and so when tweaking is necessary it's difficult to get under the hood and make something happen that needs to happen (like once I couldn't get linebreaks in figure captions.. Simple in LaTeX, but in LyX...) Sometimes when it IS possible to do LaTeX tweaking it won't behave nicely with LyX because LyX isn't technically a LaTeX frontend, it uses its own typesetting language and converts at compile if you want e.g. a pdf in the style of pdflatex. One example of this is putting in \noindent to remove spurious indenting after figures,equations. Put it next to text in LyX and it won't compile even though it's in its own LaTeX environment.
For small projects those things aren't really a big deal, you get by with a workaround.. but on a huge project like my thesis you have put in so much work and already have a huge base of work that the little things just need to work, because you can't just say "oh well just won't do that thing." Also the errors you get at compile are all LaTeX errors, which even if you're editing a LaTeX document aren't terribly informative, but editing LyX it can be next to impossible to tell where that error is coming from without exporting to LaTeX and looking, which costs time.
Still.. Fix these things, and LyX has the potential to be a massive productivity tool. Many of the proofs in my thesis I directly began in LyX without working out on paper beforehand, and then edited it for prettiness later. It's the perfect balance between proper typesetting and what mathematics gets presented to the user. WYSIWYM as the LyX folks say, but still usable as a notebook for on-the-fly work.
Some features I'd love to see is a solid symbolic math interface. It has one currently but it's limited. Scientific Workplace has an *excellent* symbolic interface, and when I used that (which I don't anymore because it's not portable across multiple OS) I had a huge productivity gain. Imagine typing in a frustratingly complicated integral that you need in a proof, and just highlighting it and typing "Ctrl+e" and it spits out the typeset solution before your eyes IN YOUR DOCUMENT. Sure you'll have to edit it down because likely it will exceed margins, or isn't exactly in the form that is most appropriate for the context.. but that's editing work that you'll have to do anywhere anyways. I'd also like to see a better supported nomenclature package, which is currently a tad buggy in LyX (random deleting of nomenclature entries, no way to browse nomenclature entries throughout document without resorting to ctrl+f, etc).
LyX is great, but the fact that it is something you need to install on a desktop + the interface makes it look like something from the early 1990s. What is needed is really some thing like Google Docs, but made with latex output in mind. That icnldues citation management, etc. Some friends and I are giving it a shot with Fidus Writer ( http://www.fiduswriter.com/ ). will be usable and open source very soon, but there is a video and a beta version there already.
While BibTeX is great and all, most of my fellow grad students use Zotero as our citation databases. Thanks to the ease of synchronization of both citations and files, it has replaced most other citation systems. Having a plugin capability like in LibreOffice would really make LyX the perfect tool for every dissertation being written. Sure plugins exist for using Zotero to create Bibtex files, but the beauty of LyX is in it's simplicity. Citations aren't simple with LyX/BibTeX if you need a citation format not used by the sciences. Zotero idiot proofs things for the humanities and the arts as well.
I think it comes down to different workflows.
A typical academic or grad student will constantly revise a document. By the time I've written a paper, I've probably done editing equivalent to re-writing it 10x. Most of the time is spent writing text and formulas.
If you are spending a lot of time doing formatting, either of the document or very complex formulas, then LyX probably isn't a good solution. But if your formulas remain within what LyX can handle and the document is nothing but text and formulas, LyX great. I don't even bother to preview anymore, now my eyes have adjusted to the ugly formatting within the LyX gui.
I wrote two papers in LyX and my dissertation in LaTeX. LyX is great, except that it, and LaTex, needs a better change tracking feature. This is one place that Ribbonville excels at, pun not intentional. Maybe add integration with SVN or Mercurial, too.
Today online work is a minimum requirement for text editors, so LyX should support collaborative work in the same way google docs does. Hey, I wonder how hard it would be to use Google Docs API as a backend for LyX? Then you have the server infrastructure and sharing for free.
The next thing I really want to se in LyX is WYSIWYG editor for layouts. For business work, LyX is far from being usable.
What I would really like to see is better integration with BibTeX. Now you really need to know what's going on and even then it's somewhat tricky. Live preview and examples instead of "you need to select Natbib (Jurabib, what...?) there and aprs.bst there and remember to add the list of references to ToC", maybe? That ToC thingy should be on by default IMO. The citation styles should also include (Norman 2002) instead of just (Norman, 2002).
LaTeX style import could always do with improvements, even if it probably can't ever be 100% compatible. Using LyX to edit a document based on a conference template would just be sooo handy.
Improved support for shared editing through, say, version control systems, would be a great thing to have. Something like Google Docs (live editing) would of course be awesome, but probably not a piece of cake to implement.
LyX used to be really fast back in the day, but now the performance has steadily got worse. Almost unusably slow with 1GHz machines. Maybe some performance tuning?
Minor bits that would probably be easy to do:
- Ready-made settings to remove orphans & widows instead of preamble hacking
- Support for automatically centering float images
The 1. missing feature in TeX land is collaboration features. It's not horrible -- you can split the doc into files for different sections (don't know if you can do this in LyX) and use source control or Dropbox -- but it's not particularly elegant. Just having seamless integration with source control would be great: some kind of interactive conflict handling and easy committing of all dependent resources. It could also be useful for single-user projects to have revision tracking. Perhaps the Lyx project could be a git repository by default, but I would of course prefer if it supported SVN and anything else that comes along too. Something like the SVN integration for Eclipse would be cool, but it wouldn't have to be that comprehensive. Lyx would of course still have to support stand-alone files without all the VCS mumbo jumbo.
The 1. missing idea from my previous post is the output format. There is no reason to have documents be a stack of pages when they are displayed on a screen. It is absolutely boneheaded. There are solutions for producing HTML from TeX source, this was the first search result: http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/ . I don't know why academics keep ignoring this and keep making PDFs which are only good for printing and for displaying on large monitors. There are many small devices which are better suited for reading (e.g. on the train), and PDF papers look like crap on them ( http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/12/01/214255/ask-slashdot-tablets-for-papers-are-we-there-yet ). The problem with HTML is that it can't be saved locally and passed around easily. Maybe EPUB can help. The page I linked has a section on how to make EPUBs. So my suggestion is to have a prominent option to output to EPUB. Strike the collaboration features, we can handle using git or SVN for a few more years.
I disagree, except for one thing. You are so good at LaTeX, that you have no need for LyX. That is fine. Most people never get there - for them, it can't be much harder than "using word". Such people can now get LaTeX typesetting quality without knowing a single LaTeX command.
I know LaTeX well, but I still prefer LyX for the sheer speed. A keyboard shortcut instead of typing "\section{}" over and over and over. No compile errors either, no debugging of my document. With LyX, I can go to a full-day meeting and write the minutes in real time - including formatting. And send out a nice-looking PDF as soon as the meeting ends - no afterwork needed. Try that using only LaTeX. Perhaps you can - I know I cannot.
As for things going wrong in big projects - what would that be? I have written a book in LyX - nothing special going wrong. The publisher had lots of layout requirements, including a provided font. That was handled with a few pages of LaTeX-code. But the book content - all 384 pages - was written in LyX.
While it is possible to make LyX fail (usually by inserting malformed LaTeX code), it does not get worse with large projects. I have heard of word struggling with hundred-page documents and TOC errors and such - but not LyX. I created a 16000 page document as a stress test once. It made LyX slower - but no crashes or other errors.