[Vimoutliner] sulky otl2lyx.pl

[Steve Litt]

On Friday 16 February 2007 04:24, Grahame Blackwood wrote:
> Hi All
>
> This is my first posting after recently trying out VimOutliner (partly as
> means of getting to know Vim) and was intrigued by the idea of using the
> otl2lyx.pl to transfer otl files into Lyx, which I use a lot. However,
> whatever I do when trying to use it the programme either goes sulky on me
> and tells me nothing, or occassionly spits out some error message.
>
> I'm certainly not clear about the syntax of the arguments but have been
> trying, for instance:
>
> ./otl2lyx.pl vo_myfile.otl  myfile.lyx
>
> Is this correct?

Bad Programmer, no pizza!

I forgot to document how to use it, or documented it wrong.

otl2lyx.pl is a filter, where the outline comes in through stdin and the LyX 
comes out via stdout. So in your case, it would look like this:

cat vo_myfile.otl | ./otl2lyx.pl > myfile.lyx

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

The outputted LyX is incomplete -- it has no document prefix or any of that 
stuff. So what you do is create a shell LyX doc consisting of two lines:

Insert converted outline below here
Insert converted outline above here

Then use Vim to take myfile.lyx and insert it between those lines (and their 
layouts) in the shell LyX doc, and whammo, you have a doc you can use with 
LyX.

This seems like a lot of work, but it's maybe 15 minutes, and using VO over 
some other outliner saves hours or days or weeks. My 309 page, 100,000 
word "Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist" started out 
as a 965 headline outline. After conversion, it was a LyX document with 
headings down to subsubsection, all just waiting to be filled in.

If you can tell me where you saw the documentation indicating how to run this, 
I'll change it in March (right now everything's just too busy). Please remind 
me again in very early March.

Thanks

STeveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/