LyX and Scientific Word/Workplace

[Ken]

Hi. There is a Wiki page on importing Scientific Workplace (SWP)
documents into LyX:
http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/ImportingFromSWP
but I can not seem to find any information on import a LyX document into SWP.

I love using LyX but my co-author uses Scientific Word/Workplace. I
don't want to have to buy a copy for myself but I am not able export
my LyX documents in a way that he can import them. I have tried in
LyX File->Export->LaTeX but when I try to import that into SWP I get
the error:

"Error while reading paragraph 13.
Document has been truncated."

followed by

"A serious program error has occurred.
...{various dump and support information}"

and SWP crashes.

Is there any advice on how I can export LyX to SWP as I love LyX and
really, really don't want to have to buy/learn SWP.

Thanks,
Ken

[Ken]

Minor correction: SWP crashes when I simply try to open LyX's exported
.tex file. In SWP if I choose to open a non-SWP tex file I get the
error "The file ... is not valid for the selected filter." SWP does
not crash but I am still unable to import the .tex file created by
LyX.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ken

Post by Ken
Hi. There is a Wiki page on importing Scientific Workplace (SWP)
http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/ImportingFromSWP
but I can not seem to find any information on import a LyX document into SWP.
I love using LyX but my co-author uses Scientific Word/Workplace. I
don't want to have to buy a copy for myself but I am not able export
my LyX documents in a way that he can import them. I have tried in
LyX File->Export->LaTeX but when I try to import that into SWP I get
"Error while reading paragraph 13.
Document has been truncated."
followed by
"A serious program error has occurred.
...{various dump and support information}"
and SWP crashes.
Is there any advice on how I can export LyX to SWP as I love LyX and
really, really don't want to have to buy/learn SWP.
Thanks,
Ken

[Paul A. Rubin]

Post by Ken
Minor correction: SWP crashes when I simply try to open LyX's exported
.tex file. In SWP if I choose to open a non-SWP tex file I get the
error "The file ... is not valid for the selected filter." SWP does
not crash but I am still unable to import the .tex file created by
LyX.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ken

Post by Ken
Hi. There is a Wiki page on importing Scientific Workplace (SWP)
http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/ImportingFromSWP
but I can not seem to find any information on import a LyX document into SWP.
I love using LyX but my co-author uses Scientific Word/Workplace. I
don't want to have to buy a copy for myself but I am not able export
my LyX documents in a way that he can import them. I have tried in
LyX File->Export->LaTeX but when I try to import that into SWP I get
"Error while reading paragraph 13.
Document has been truncated."
followed by
"A serious program error has occurred.
...{various dump and support information}"
and SWP crashes.
Is there any advice on how I can export LyX to SWP as I love LyX and
really, really don't want to have to buy/learn SWP.
Thanks,
Ken

Can you View -> DVI the document successfully in LyX? If you run LaTeX
against the exported .tex file, do you get a valid DVI?

The only other thing I can think of is maybe an encoding issue. I'm
pretty sure the exported .tex file will be UTF-8. I don't know what SWP
can/cannot ingest. Does paragraph 13 contain an funky characters? You
might try running iconv against the .tex file. Maybe conversion to
ASCII would fix the problem?

There's a support page about importing external .tex files at
http://www.mackichan.com/index.html?techtalk/660.htm~mainFrame. Doesn't
say anything about encoding (or crashes), though.

FYI, a few years back I worked with a co-author using SWP. The SWP ->
LyX direction was a pain because SWP uses its own LaTeX macros, but we
had no problem the other direction. I just exported a plain LaTeX file
and my co-author imported it effortlessly. This was an earlier version
of LyX (and likely SWP), though.

/Paul

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Post by Ken
Hi. There is a Wiki page on importing Scientific Workplace (SWP)
http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/ImportingFromSWP
but I can not seem to find any information on import a LyX document into SWP.
I love using LyX but my co-author uses Scientific Word/Workplace. I
don't want to have to buy a copy for myself but I am not able export
my LyX documents in a way that he can import them. I have tried in
LyX File->Export->LaTeX but when I try to import that into SWP I get
"Error while reading paragraph 13.
Document has been truncated."
followed by
"A serious program error has occurred.
...{various dump and support information}"
and SWP crashes.
Is there any advice on how I can export LyX to SWP as I love LyX and
really, really don't want to have to buy/learn SWP.

Well, it'd be difficult for us to debug SWP LateX import... What about
convincing your coauthor to use LyX instead :-)

Abdel.

[Helge Hafting]

Post by Ken
Hi. There is a Wiki page on importing Scientific Workplace (SWP)
http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/ImportingFromSWP
but I can not seem to find any information on import a LyX document into SWP.
I love using LyX but my co-author uses Scientific Word/Workplace. I
don't want to have to buy a copy for myself but I am not able export
my LyX documents in a way that he can import them. I have tried in
LyX File->Export->LaTeX but when I try to import that into SWP I get
"Error while reading paragraph 13.
Document has been truncated."
followed by
"A serious program error has occurred.
...{various dump and support information}"
and SWP crashes.
Is there any advice on how I can export LyX to SWP as I love LyX and
really, really don't want to have to buy/learn SWP.

It is definitely cheaper for your co-author to "buy" LyX, than it is for
you to buy SWP. There won't be any budget problems, even if
he only uses LyX for this one book. If you really like LyX, then
perhaps you can help him install LyX and get him started with it?

As for problems with SWP crashing, that is something you have to
complain to SWP developers about. It is *possible* to change the latex
output from LyX to accomodate SWP import, _if_ you can find a developer
interested in doing so. Even so, it won't appear until the next release.
Currently nothing can be done, as we have no idea what it is that
cause SWP trouble. And the LyX developers tend to use LyX mostly, so are
not likely to figure this out on their own.


Helge Hafting

[Alan G Isaac]

"A serious program error has occurred. ...{various dump
and support information}"
and SWP crashes.

Although it is a good and interesting commercial product,
it has been a long time since I have had much experience
with SWP. My recollection is that such dumps usually
contain information about where their parser choked.
Look at it carefully.

If that does not help, delete half the .tex file
at a time and find the problem by repeatedly importing the
remainder. This should only take about 15 minutes,
even for a big file.

The resulting information could actually prove useful
to the LyX community, since it may suggest
that LyX is outputting something that can create
problems for LaTeX parsers.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac

[Ken]

Thanks for all of the replies. I definitely agree LyX is awesome! But
just as I don't want to learn+buy SWP, my colleagues do not have the
time to learn LyX. We must use SWP for the master/working copy (not
just on this project but on a couple of them).

I'll look into why SWP does not like LyX latex output and see if I
can't figure something out. As for the question regarding paragraph
13, I have not figured that out yet. I need to investigate whether
the error is related to "paragraph" or line 13. And whether blank
lines are considered paragraphs. I'll let you know what I discover.

Ken

[Ken]

Hi all,

I wanted to follow up this thread in case anyone else has the same issue. The
temporary solution I have found is to:
(1) in LyX, do File > Export > LaTeX (plain)
(2) in SWP, do File > Import Contents

This appears to import the LaTeX code within the begin/end{document}.

This seems to work for a document with text, mathematical equations, and floats
but it does NOT like tables. When the document has a table SWP utilizes 100% of
the CPU and the memory usage climbs continuously.

I'll update this thread if/when I discover more.

Ken