This project is an experiment in leveraging LaTeX3 concepts to create a simple author/document-designer interface for creating correct, structured, and tweakable documents.
The project arises out of a question I asked on the LaTeX-L mailing list. Frank Mittelbach raised some excellent, high-level, and achievable goals for a project such as this; these are discussed in *Goals. In the same thread, Paulo Cerada raises equally excellent concerns that this project must take care to avoid or otherwise address; these are discussed in *Roadblocks.
The greatest distinct of LaTeX3 is the solid definition of layers. These layers are what make a project such as this feasible.
- document class definition layer
- a collection of author interfaces (‘abstract spec’) that are appropriate for this class
- document class realization layer
- a set of realizations for each abstract spec defined in the class definition layer
This project must be able understand the syntax of template specifications as used in definition layer. The project must also be able to discover and load any number of realization layers to choose from and optionally tweak.
- ingest document class definition layer specification and logically understand such a specification enough to interactively provide graphical means to interact with it
- ingest document class realization layer specification (and included templates) and logically understand such a specification enough to interactively provide graphical means to tweak
- object type repository
- …
- template repository
- …
- instance creation
- …
This project is not LyX. LyX’s implementation involves a separate, LaTeX-inspired languages as its code-behind. This project aims solely to interpret LaTeX3 definitions (and exactly those definitions which would not be considered Turing-complete—objects, templates, instances, and finally author-uses).
Thus, the code is not generated in the same sense as LyX generates LaTeX code. While LyX does not work with LaTeX directly, this project does. LaTeX3 provides simple-enough syntax as far as the author and document-designer are concerned, and these two roles are the extent of this project’s scope.