Paul A. Rubin wrote:
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.

And there are all kinds of free services out there, too, that will allow simple versioning systems.

rh

Reply via email to