[eLyXer-users] Re: eLyXer 0.98 released

[Philiрp Rеichmuth]

Am Thu, 13 May 2010 02:02:21 +0200 schrieb Alex Fernandez:
> Version 0.98 of eLyXer, the LyX to HTML converter, has just been
> released. The version number bump (from 0.43 to 0.98) signals the
> impending 1.0 release, since all major features planned have already
> been already added; please report back any issues so that 1.0 is as
> complete and bug-free as possible.

Thanks!

Here's a question. Recently I've been writing some Python scripts to parse
LyX files for keywords to generate indices (in a rather special scenario,
looking for text formatted in some character styles only if it appears in
column 1 or 3 of a table, that sort of thing). I used eLyXer's classes
basically as a parser for LyX files, without using the conversion
functionality at all. I find it quite useful because it gives me tree
models of a LyX file. You can then write all sorts of tree traversal
functions that do what you want, even something like XPath. 

This isn't obviously what eLyXer was designed for and there were some
glitches, such as having to patch extra values into ContainerConfig for
parsing custom character style insets. But eLyXer in its current state
would be a good basis for a universal LyX file parser and document object
model in Python; one could then refactor the HTML converter to work on this
document object model. This would be useful for everybody processing LyX
files with Python scripts, also if the file format eventually changes
towards XML or whatever.  It's obviously nothing for an 1.0 release, more
like 2.0, but what do you think of it?

Philipp