eLyXer
elixir, n: a substance believed to cure all ills.
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.
Requirements
eLyXer is a standalone tool: it does not require that LyX is installed to run. It can convert documents generated with versions of LyX from 1.5.5 through 1.6.2 (and probably earlier versions). It requires Python 2.3.4, and should work with versions up to 2.6.1. It has been tested to run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Resource usage is minimum. Converting UserGuide.lyx (154 pages, about 40000 words) takes close to 50 seconds on my 1st-generation Asus Eee, which sports a 530MHz Celeron processor. On a modern machine it should be ligthning fast. Memory usage is also quite frugal, remaining always below 10 MB.
Usage
eLyXer is a command line tool written in Python. Basic usage is as simple as writing at the command line prompt:
$ elyxer.py document.lyx page.html
or, on Windows:
> Python.exe elyxer.py document.lyx page.html
where document.lyx is your LyX document, and page.html is the resulting HTML page. Write
$ elyxer.py --help
or see the user guide for details.
Downloads
You can download the latest version 0.22, created on 2009-05-15, from the project’s
download area. See the
change log for information about past versions.
Note: if this latest version hasn’t yet hit the mirrors and you are impatient to try it out, please visit the Savannah direct download page.
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
mailing list, although there is not much activity in it yet (meaning zero messages overall). Bugs can be reported at
the Savannah page.
Acknowledgments
This little project is my little contribution back to the wonderful LyX community, for all these years of fruitful use.
Thanks to Stevan White for encouraging me to publish the tool; to Christian Ridderström for helping me out right at the start; to Ignacio García for relentless encouragement; to Abdelrazak Younes, Pavel Sanda, Günther Milde, Olivier Ripoll, José Matos, Iain Mac Donald, Uwe Stöhr for their interesting suggestions; to Nikos Alexandris, Joachim Kreimer-de Fries (Osnabryg), Richard Talley, Wolfgang Keller, Murray Eisenberg, Robert Orr, a Linux guy in Singapore, Anders Ekberg, Pavel Sanda, Steve Hastings for their testing. A silent “thank you” goes to all those who downloaded the tool and silently tested it to their satisfaction (or were not bugged enough to write about it). And finally thanks to all those who have helped and yet I am now forgetting about them, for not hating me for it.