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Comment by phreeza | Hacker News Reader

I think LyX kind of hits the sweet spot between WYSIWYG editing, which helps immensely with tables and free text, and the power of LaTeX for equations.

One thing I never understood is why it has its own file format and doesn't operate on plain latex files. That makes interoperability with latex and in particular colaboration with non-latex users harder.

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It's because LyX is a structured document editor, and its format is strictly simpler than the full power of TeX. (La)TeX isn't actually that structured, and with the ability to do weird stuff with macros, it becomes impossible to convert losslessly from TeX to any more structured format (e.g. docx; something like ps or pdf is less structured).

In other words, it can't operate on plain LaTeX files because someone not using LyX might edit the files in such a way that LyX can no longer handle them. By using their own format, while they don't prevent someone from editing the file without LyX, they can at least guarantee that a valid LyX file will always be loadable by LyX.

The weird thing is, LyX can in fact import LaTeX files, and dump any unrecognized command into a red box. If it were just possible to use the imported latex file, and keeping latex as the default format while avoid reformatting the entire file upon re-exporting it to latex, that would make the interoperation possible.

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