Etienne lepercq wrote:
I am new to LyX, but not as new to LaTeX : I used Kile for quiet a few time
now.
I would like to use LyX to work with several people on an article. As LyX is
much more user-friendly than Kile, a pure LaTeX editor, I convinced my
collaborators to give a try to LyX.
There is te least one thing in LyX (and LaTeX) that is not easy to handle,
sharing a whole document to make it modifiable by others : one have to build
an archive with all figures and latex source, collaborators have to untar
it, open LyX, read/modify/etc... and then... rebuild archive, send the
archive, etc...
This is counter-productive, not easy to use, it is a pain. One simple
solution I see for this is to give the ability to LyX to open, say .tar
archives, with a specific tree inside (.yx sources, then
figures/allFigures.Whatever or something). Such archive could be called
.lyxZ files ;-)
Does such feature exist already ? I searched over FAQ/Documentation/Asked on
#LyX but did not find anything more than : two implementations were made
once, but as nobody could say which was the best... none were released !!
This is not _that_ complex to implement, but is there a way to have such
feature now, or is there a way to at least release one relatively-good
implementation ?
Thanks a lot.
Etienne Lepercq
An alternative to swapping tarballs or zip archives back and forth is to
set up a version control system on a server somewhere, with Internet
access, and let users check drafts in and out. LyX supports CVS and
Subversion (that I know of) and maybe other versioning systems.
Assuming that you have access to a server, it's pretty easy to set up a
versioning service (speaking from personal experience). This approach
lets the user download/upload just the changes, and helps prevent
collisions when two coauthors get the urge to edit the same section
concurrently.
/Paul
