I have a problem. Say one had an environment where document creation
for clients is done with Microsoft Word. There is no real version
control in the environment, and engineers writing technical
documentation spend half of their time fighting with line by line
formatting issues with Word, and the other half of their time dealing
the mental anguish of it all. Templates exist for document layout,
but there are typically several versions floating around so no one
knows which one is the latest, and templates typically need to be
modified extensively depending upon the purpose of a document.
I had a vision of a system that would solve these problems by doing
the following:
- Store a master style, or several master styles that are used during
document creation
- Store "templates" for documents that are for different purposes.
One selects the type of document they want to generate, several
prewritten sections are selected that would normally go into that
document. The user can deselect sections, or select addition sections
and reorder as appropriate before creating the TeX source and starting
the editing process. The prewritten sections are updated regularly by
subject matter experts, and creation of a new document always causes
the most updated information to be pulled.
- All edits are version controlled
I was thinking of using a database and a web app to do this. This
isn't very convenient though, because writing of the documentation
would have to happen with an internet connection. LyX looks very
interesting to me. I have very little experience with TeX, but enough
to know that it's definitely superior to Word. Can LyX provide the
functionality that I need? I installed it, but the version control
menu is empty. How do I go about setting up LyX to work with SVN? I
couldn't find documentation on that.
And, the big question, how would one go about implementing a system
and workflow that provides the functionality listed above. It needs
to be as straighforward as possible. I'm going to be dealing with
cross-platform clients.
Is there a way to do the templating and selection of sections in a
reasonable way in LyX? Maybe the master doc is created with a bunch
of includes in it that has every include available, and then sections
that I don't want can be commented out, and sections I want can be
uncommented. If I have an include in a document, is there any way in
LyX to pull that content out of the include and just insert it
directly into the master document? Or could something be done using
the tab support and opening each section in it's own tab for ease of
navigation? Can LyX collapse sections within a document if I'm not
working on that particular section?
If this is something that is too complex for the user's to learn, it's
something that will never happen. So it would need to be laid out and
simplified as much as possible, and ideally everything would need to
be done through LyX and without requiring the use of extra software
apps directly (such as svn commands on the command line)
Thanks for any input you guys have.
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