LyXBlogger
Premise
LyX really is a new way of thinking about documents. There is a bit of a learning curve about it, but once you get the formatting set up the way you want it, each successive chapter in your book sets up exactly the same-- automatically. It also prevents you from doing things that don’t normally make sense, like putting two spaces between a word, or a space at the beginning of a paragraph. It won’t even let you accidentally (or on purpose) put two blank lines between paragraphs. Content is content and layout is layout - and LyX does a good job keeping them separate.
So many of us have become LyX addicts for these and other reasons. But when one wants to publish to the web, as in creating an online blog, there comes a dilemma of the having your cake and eating it too variety. Of course LyX users still want to compose everything they do in LyX. But blogging engines, such as WordPress, don’t speak LyX, and they don’t understand PDF either. They hunger for none other than xhtml. Ah, but how to get your beautiful looking, carefully arranged document from LyX to WordPress, while retaining your document’s organization and allowing you to still manage your own CSS style file to tweak the formatting?
LyX die hards have done it the hard way before. Like composing a document in LyX, then copying the screen into the blog engine composition window, and re-adding any formatting that was lost for titles, headings, emphasis, lists, and so on. Well those days are over. Now you can talk directly from LyX to your favorite blogging engine. That is, as long as your favorite blogging engine is WordPress.
Solution
LyXBlogger allows you to post to your WordPress blog right from LyX. LyXBlogger 0.32 comes with the following features:
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Provides XML-RPC connectivity to WordPress Blogs
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Uploads images automatically
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Supports eLyXer XHTML format
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Supports LyX 2.0 (internal) LyXHTML format
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Extracts title from document and uses it as the posting title
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Preserves document organization hierarchy as CSS classes
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Provides consistent look among all your blog entries based on your master CSS file
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Retrieves category list from server to allow user selection
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Gives option to post to test site at blogtest.letseatalready.com
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Displays messages and gets user input through xterm window
Download
LyXBlogger is available as a free download from
here.
Installation
LyXBlogger is installed as a Python module. For instructions, see the
user's guide.
Supported xhtml converters for LyX 1.6.x
Supported xhtml converters for LyX 2.0
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eLyXer
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LyXHTML (Internal in LyX 2.0)
Usage
LyXBlogger is a standalone command line tool. It can be invoked from the command line as:
$ python -m lyxblogger [source file]
It can also integrated with LyX so you can access it from the LyX export menu. For details, see see the
user's guide.
Test Drive
LyXBlogger comes out of the box ready to upload to a test site (blogtest.letseatalready.com) where you can test its posting capability. LyXBlogger will ask you whether to post to the test site or not. For details, see see the
user's guide.
History
0.34 Added support for Microsoft Windows. Verified support for Mac OS X. Changed name to LyXBlogger (with a capital “X”). Modularized source code and used
eLyXer's coalesce.py to form it into one module for distribution. Includes unit testing code. Changed release license to
GNU GPL3.
0.32: Asks for confirmation before uploading to default domain. Prompts for a new title if eLyXer’s default of ’Converted document’ is found.
0.31: Adds eLyXer support for LyX 1.6.x and 2.0
0.30: Changed to xml-rpc connectivity for automated posting of xhtml and images. Runs on LyX 2.0 (internal) LyXHTML format.
0.20 and previous: Provided copy-and-paste html output for manual posting of text only. May still be of interest for other projects.
eLyXer (pronounced elixir) is a LyX to HTML converter. While there are a ton of such projects all over the web, eLyXer has a clear focus on flexibility and elegant output.
LyX is a wonderful text editor which produces beautiful PDF files. Internally it exports documents to LaTeX, and from there to PDF. Sadly there is not an equivalent “export to HTML” option… Until now! With eLyXer you can convert your master’s thesis, learned article, fascinating novel or love letter to a web page that you can then share, publish on the web or import into other text editors.
eLyXer (including this page and all accompanying materials) is licensed under the
GPL version 3 or, at your option, any later version. See the
LICENSE file for details.
Usage
eLyXer is a command line tool written in Python. Basic usage is as simple as writing at the command line prompt:
$ python -m lyxblogger input_file.xhtml
or, on Windows:
> Python.exe -m lyxblogger input_file.xhtml
Contact
You can contact the main developer at
elyxer@gmail.com; he really likes getting challenging documents and making eLyXer work with them. Any document sample you send will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.
The author lingers around official LyX mailing lists and monitors for mentions of eLyXer. You can also
join the low-volume
mailing list, where announcements of new versions are always posted. Bugs can be reported at the
Savannah page.
Contact
For questions, support, and bug reports, you can contact the main developer at
JackDesert556@gmail.com. By doing so you can help the author improve LyXBlogger for future users. You can send your sample documents with a description of the errors encountered. Any documents sent will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to
Becky Carson for inspiring me to become a blogger. Thanks to Bruce Veidt for coining the name LyXBlogger. Thanks to Alex Fernandez for producing one of the xhtml converters that LyXBlogger works with,
eLyXer, for creating complete documentation which was easy to modify for this site, and for providing much-needed background information about how to integrate a Python project with LyX. Thanks to Anne Geoghegan for letting me test LyXBlogger on her Mac. Thanks to Andrea Bussinger for her continued support as I sat on my throne and typed away. Thanks to Richard Heck for reviewing LyX -LyXBlogger integration patches. Thanks to nongnu.org for hosting this project.