On 10/25/2010 03:52 AM, Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
On 10/24/2010 07:53 PM, Richard Heck wrote:
On 10/24/2010 12:31 PM, David Whetstone wrote:
Hi, I'm new here. I only recently joined this list. I've recently
acquired an iPad, and found myself wanting to be able to take notes
with embedded equations and such. AFAICT, no such app yet exists.
Then I thought about LyX. Even if one was not able to compile a
latex document on the ipad, LyX's editing features could still be
very useful. So my question is, how feasible is this?
I've spent the last couple of weeks on an exploratory mission - to
see how hard it would be to build LyX for the iPad. I've gotten as
far as getting a clean build. Completely non-functional, of
course. Much in front-end and support is just stubbed out. But
it's a start.
I ask this question now because I've noticed recent comments to the
effect of removing the GUI agnosticism that exists in the LyX
codebase. It's this agnosticism that gave me the idea that it just
might be possible.
I realize it will be a lot of work. But I think LyX for iPad could
occupy a useful niche in the iPad appverse. So tell me, am I
wasting my time?
Well, as you presumably know, LyX depends pretty heavily upon Qt,
both in the frontend and in support. Since Qt does not run on the
iPad, you'd have to replace all of that. This is a massive
undertaking. Some years ago, there was an attempt to produce a Gtk
frontend for LyX. This was at a time when the core-gui stuff was much
less entangled than it is now.
This is not true. The core and gui stuff was very much more entangled
at this time than it is now... lots of glue glue code everywhere.
Nowadays, all you have to do is to rewrite frontend/qt4. QtCore is
also used in src/support/ but the project that listed below shows that
this is not a problem. Still, having a ported QtGui is the much easier
path of course.
I could be wrong, but I think we now have much more application logic in
the Gui* classes then we did before the removal of all the Controller*
classes. Perhaps alot of that could just be copied over, but it is still
more work.
Anyway, I had a different thought, namely: If what you're looking at is
more of a note-taking application with the ability to handle formulas,
then there is a LOT of LyX that can remain in stub form. You probably
don't need tables or any of the InsetCommand hierarchy. Probably not
footnotes, etc. If so, then the problem becomes at least somewhat
easier. Indeed, you might just want to fork us, as many of the
improvements in LyX wouldn't be that relevant to what you were doing.
Richard
