On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 05:04:41PM +0200, Michael Meskes wrote: > Do you mean "just" calling wdiff? I looked into Word a little bit and it > enables you to write stuff inside that revision control mode. That is > deleting text already present when you change into the mode means it > just gets marked as deleted but new text may be deleted as usual. And > Word also can compare two documents. So I guess, he's looking for both.
Ok. I just had a look, too. [And to explain to a few people why _I_ need to have a look at WinWord. Things like that are definitely bad for the reputation...] It basically looks as if this could be implemented for ordinary text by having two binary flag on everything. "old text" has no flag, "new text" the "new" flag and "deleted text" the deleted flag. I am not so sure concerning format changes, though. This would lead to a fairly straightforward implementation within mathed as you can lay your hands on each individual char there. To throw in a number: Three or four days for _me_ for the editing/saving/loading part without any gui stuff. But mind that this is math only! Ordinary LyX text is a completely different matter as it comes in bigger chunks and the infrastructure is a lot more messy there. Actually the whole thing somehow resembles the "character styles" we have been discussing lately. But we don't have these. People are working in that direction from different angles. So given enough "infrastructure work" (aka cleanup) plus "character styles" the revision mode might be road kill (i.e. three or for days of work as for the math only solution, plus the GUI). It is completely unclear how long the "infrastructure work" would take. This might easily take up a few "volunteer months". One could of course try to tag on either the character style or the revision stuff directly without doing the infrastructure thing first. But this will be no fun at all, and I actually doubt that this will take less time than doing it properly. Numbers for somebody working on that as a paid job? Ok, bold guess: Three or four months for the general cleanup. Another one for the character styles. Another one for the revision mode including GUI. Give or take a factor of ten ;-} Andre' -- Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one. (T. Jefferson)
