>>>>> "Christian" == Christian Ridderström <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, rgheck wrote: I mainly answered to your points in the other post but you mention some interesting facts I did not know about. > That sounds a lot like my old (not yet dead idea) of > storing/editing LyX documents on a wiki. You would be able to open > the "wiki pages" (documents) from LyX and edit them properly. When > saving, it goes back to the server. However, simple editing can > also be made possible directly through the wiki, with a crude > version shown in the browser. Finally it'd be possible to tell the > server to use LyX to directly produce a PDF-version of the > document. So this is already possible? > I'm primarily waiting for the LyX file format to migrate to XML. That would be really great. > As an aside, it is already possible to use an extension to the wiki > that takes wiki pages, convert them to XML, converts that into LaTeX > and finally runs LaTeX on the output to produce a PDF. It works pretty > well. Again, this solution already exists? > Some aspects of collaboration can be _greatly_ increased by making it > very easy for people to modify the document, so the idea certainly has > potential. However, one thing I'm slowly learning from experience with > the wiki and other collaboratively work (e.g. sw development) is that > support from tools is extremely helpful for tasks such as: > * Remembering and accessing previous revisions (our wiki sucks at this) > * Dealing with merges > * Dealing branching/forking of documents Well as I said this might be important for *huge* projects, but say for short articles <= 50 pages and up to 5 authors is not necessarily. > I think that what's basically needed is a distributed VCS as a > backend, with LyX (and wiki) support for dealing intelligently with > the documents. > It would be quite hard to get it all. On the other hand, a lot of > people would be _really_ happy with just the following ability: > * Click edit on a "LyX page" on the server > * Be able to edit the document > * Save changes back to the server Right the group of people I have in mind. > This is really what the a wiki page is. With pmwiki-mode for emacs > I've implemented this functionality (it's relatively easy really[*]), > and you can get a huge increase in efficiency. Can you give me details on that please. I have enhanced a mode for (X)emacs, wikipedia-mode.el, so I am interested in this issue. I presume you use mozex as an interface for the editor? > Just wish I had the time to do this with LyX, but I'm hoping for the > implementation to be simplier with the XML transition. > regards > /Christian > [*] It'd probably be quite easy to implement the straight forward > aspects of the above for single files. You could just have a wrapper > script that downloads the file, launches LyX and when LyX is done > pushes the file back to the server. I might be able to > design/implement/deploy the basic functionality for LyX on a Linux > system in a few hours against our wiki server. However, this would be > in a very simple way, so if people start using it, the feature > requests would probably make the whole thing a monster -- > functionality is added on an unsuitable framework. Take the security > aspects for instance... you don't want to get spammed in your document. > Having said the above, I think that building upon a distributed VCS > might be a way to start with a more suitable framework. Still, before > doing it I think some serious thinking of the use cases and > alternative paths need to done. > -- > Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
