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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 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.
What you want is .dvi to EPUB. That's a TeX/LaTeX feature not a LyX feature.
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.
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).
No. There are 2 TeX engines: TeX proper which goes to dvi and PDFTeX which skips .dvi. LaTeX extensions work against either engine but need to be built against both. The font system is particularly nasty since metafont isn't PDF only.
I wish that TeX would just flush .dvi and tie themselves to the PDF standard. But no, they haven't.
It would be more useful to fix LibreOffice to produce output that looks as good as TeX.
http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/ is active for OpenOffice
http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/writer2latex-1 is the Libre version though no one is pushing across changes.