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ELyXer

eLyXer was a LyX -> HTML converter. While there are a ton of such projects all over the web, eLyXer has a clear focus on flexibility and elegant output.

Caution: this project has not been maintained for a decade, and is no longer available for major distributions. (An alternative is using internal LyXHTML export.)

1.  Background

elixir, n: a substance believed to cure all ills

LyX is a wonderful editor; its PDF output is perhaps unmatched by graphical editors. But the customary interchange method of today is HTML, and LyX does not produce HTML at all. There are some tools for TeX -> HTML conversion, and even LyX -> HTML, but the results tend to be poor and rigid. eLyXer is meant to produce acceptable-to-beautiful HTML code, depending on your browser's Unicode and CSS rendering merits.

The project is now hosted at Savannah.nongnu.org. For more information be sure to visit the project's main page for more information.

2.  Usage and Requirements

eLyXer is written in Python and requires that you have a supported version (2.3.4 to 2.6.x) on the target machine.[Windows Python 2.7.3 works, 3.3.0 fails, April 2013] It is a command-line tool; if you are not willing to work on the command line you may use it from within LyX, which can detect it and use it. Right now it has been added to the Windows alt installer. It has also been accepted as a Debian package, so if the target machine runs Debian testing or unstable just run:

and you should be able to run elyxer as:

In any case LyX will add it to the list of known converters once you Tools|Reconfigure it; after that, View|HTML should generate an HTML file and open it in your browser of choice.

To try eLyXer as a standalone package just uncompress the distributed .tar.gz file:

or the .zip:

Then change to the docs/ directory:

next convert e.g. the included user guide:

and

Since both files should be equal (except for creation date), nothing but a single line with the dates should appear. It is a fast way of checking out that eLyXer is working on your system.

In what follows you might have to adjust the path to the elyxer executable, or just place it on the execution path (like /usr/bin on Linux).

For your own documents type at the prompt:

This command takes a LyX document called (surprisingly) document.lyx, and produces (just as surprisingly) a web page called document.html. Ta-dah! The conversion is complete. For better results you may need to copy the file docs/lyx.css to your working directory, and maybe customize it a bit.

You can also use eLyXer in a pipeline, for example:

This simple line checks all external links in your document and generates a report.

A more convoluted example can be seen at this location.

3.  Extensibility

eLyXer 0.98 supports most LyX features, including generating a TOC and correctly parsing all LyX commands. It also accepts a good deal of command line options to customize the output; be sure to read the user guide for an up-to-date list of options.

eLyXer should be quite easy to extend; see the developer guide that comes with the distribution as a starting point.

If eLyXer fails with your particular document you can send a lorem-ipsum-ized version to the main developer at: elyxer@gmail.com. He really likes getting challenging documents and making eLyXer work with them. All documents sent will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.

4.  Distribution

eLyXer is published under the GPL. You can download the latest version from the project download area. Enjoy!

5.  Categories

Category: Tools

Tools