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List:       lyx-users
Subject:    Re: Strategies for Writing Co-operation with Non-LyX Users?
From:       Helge Hafting <helge.hafting () hist ! no>
Date:       2009-02-13 15:25:00
Message-ID: 499590CC.70209 () hist ! no
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A B wrote:

> What is needed is the ability to let LyX users interact with other
> people. With good  converters that enable LyX users to take a X-file,
> open, edit, and send back a X-file, (where X = word or html or rtf or
> openoffice or xml or even MP3 (with lillypond?) ) you can work with
> LyX in any  environment. Then others can see how powerful it is and
> then show them the pricetag...
> 
There are two big problems here:

1) To define a conversion between word and lyx.
2) To implement, which will be lots of work.


1) is probably worst, because lyx and word has so different feature 
sets. And the expectations will be different too. Some users will want 
to see the same line and page breaks in LyX and word. And they want to 
keep everything else the same too - an identical conversion.
They will be disappointed to learn that this is useless and just won't 
happen. (In theory, latex _can_ place each letter individually on the 
page, in order to mimic a word document. I am not sure an identical 
conversion the other way is possible at all.)

Some will want word->lyx to have LyX lay out the document as nicely as 
possible. That is one of LyX strong points, after all. They will be 
disappointed when their "finger-painted" headings in several levels 
aren't recognized as such by lyx. They will wonder why the conversion 
won't take their long rows of spaces and actually preserve the sort-of 
alignment they achieved that way.

Some will be be pissed off when Lyx->word conversion exposes word 
weaknesses. The word document might end up with a heading on the last 
line of a page, and similiar. They'll end up blaming it on the 
conversion. But what to do? LyX documents aren't divided into pages 
until printing time, and then such things are handled automatically and 
nicely by latex. LyX doesn't implement page breaking itself.

Word has some tricky features too. Support for lots of fonts, for example.

2) Even if all problems with (1) is resolved somehow, the job will be
huge and therefore it will be hard to find a volunteer for the job. Word 
users don't know lyx enough to do it. LyX experts tend to not consider 
word a serious piece of software, and will normally spend their time 
improving Lyx itself instead.

Helge Hafting

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