Re: LaTeX templates, was Docmentation/FAQs

[Jason Rodrigues <..hidden..>]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 17:24, Chris Travers wrote:
> I am not interested in requiring that people rebuild their custom
> templates in a new system.  I am not opposed to supporting other
> engines, but I think that backwards compatibility with LaTeX and easy
> conversion from SQL-Ledger are going to require that we support it for
> the forseable future.

Agreed.

> We could, however, offer plugins to support alternatives.
>
> However, a few points:
> 1)  We really ought to revise the LaTeX of the templates to be less
> braindead and brittle.
> 2)  We need to make the templating system LyX-friendly
> 3)  We should allow the calls to the templates to hit a different
> extension for the template and a different executable to allow for
> plugins of this sort.

I think we should embrace Template Toolkit for this.  TT has a lot of support 
in the Perl community, and it's syntax is very easy. (And it  can work by 
directly entering syntax into the OO.o writer!!)  We get a lot of plugins for 
free, we don't have to deal with any working out any bugs in the original SL 
template parser.

One thing I never understood is why SL doesn't use any perl modules outside of 
DBI.  I mean, it even parses CGI query params by hand -- CGI.pm 's been in 
perl since 5.3 .  

Chris, what do you mean by 'LyX-friendly' ?  Are there any specific things a 
LyX-Friendly templating system ought to avoid .. ?

Jason