Po 02 května 2005

I wrote about my experience with LyX and the reasons why I am looking for an ideal solution to my authoring needs. One strange thing which surprises me for all that time (at least since 1998) is that there is still so little done in resolving my problems, because it seems to me that it should be an itch needed to be scratched by approximately the same number of people as users of LaTeX, so I was surprised why so few programmers seems to be interested in this (if I am not mistaken, really all exceptions from this rule I listed in the previous message on this).

Couple of days ago it came to me what’s going on—I am actually in between couple of communities with requirements slightly different from mine. I am not a typograph (even though I appreciate beautiful typography), so although I certainly appreciate beauty of typesetting provided by TeX it is not a crucial quality for me. I also appreciate its beautiful typsetting of formulas, but I really need to typeset only all three equations (and even these are really simple ones) from statistical models (as complicated as I am able to comprehend, which means they are quite simple :-)). Similarly, I miss what I see as the main target of DocBook. It is really created for computer related documents (and documentation) and it is not exactly the best DTD for my law & society dissertation. What I really need is powerful citations management, but it is done either in rather limited fashion (BibTeX, nevertheless it is still the best what is available), is in the alpha-stage and support for the actual authoring is missing (Docbook), or just a joke (OpenOffice.org).

Actually, what I would really like is some combination of Lyx (or Amaya) for simple structure-oriented authoring of slightly extended XHTML (with footnotes, generated references, table of contents, and bibliographical stuff) with powerful bibliographical management (here I am not sure whether there is any model which I could use -- simplicity of Emacs BibTeX-mode but power of MODS). There is an interesting discussion of this problem available.

Oh well. It seems that I am here alone with these too simple requests.

Category: computer Tagged: LyX BibTeX TeX structure authoring