Bibliography, equations, structured authoring, and me
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:date: 2005-05-02T06:08:00
:category: computer
:tags: LyX, BibTeX, TeX, structure, authoring

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.

.. _wrote:
    {filename}lyx-structured.rst

.. _LaTeX:
    http://www.latex-project.org
.. _TeX:
    http://www.tug.org
.. _DocBook:
    http://www.docbook.org
.. _`OpenOffice.org`:
    http://bibliographic.openoffice.org
.. _Lyx:
    http://www.lyx.org
.. _Amaya:
    http://www.w3.org/Amaya
.. _`Emacs BibTeX-mode`:
    http://www.ida.ing.tu-bs.de/people/dirk/bibtex/
.. _MODS:
    http://www.loc.gov/mods
.. _`an interesting discussion of this problem`:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20060328034957/http://www.xmlshoestring.com/xml499/authoringrequirements