Hi everyone! I concur with Flip. Currently I'm a research assistant and looking forward to waves to ease researcher daily life.
Following use cases I can think about are: [1] collaborative edited documents for research projects [2] research group knowledge base (sometime consists of experts => disjunct knowledge) [3] paper for conferences (important for cross university,institute- communication for research-results) [4] discussing or editing formulas (integration with maple & co?) - <has some one more ideas in this field> For use case 3 or maybe 1 I agree with Flip. For some conferences or some types of documents with special graphs or so, auxiliary/ additionally packages are needed. This not only end in non-trivial compiling but also in non-trivial error-feedback and -handling. I thought about an alternative to have a rudimentary version of that - emphasizing collaboration -, where on the pure text, citations or graphics are edited. But without an automated conversion from this pure version to a latex using special packages or even final pdf, this idea will end up in redundant work, one in a google wave and the pure text and one final latex version. Additionally final fixes are done in the final version and also (often occurring) last changes. (Additionally, I can't see a technically realization for such a (magically) conversion.) Because I don't see a technical realization of such a (magical) conversion, we have redundant work and we have to skip this idea. A worthwhile compromise can be, if latex-source can be edited - eventually in a rich (la-)text editor - and locally generated to a pdf and viewed. (Is this what you meant, Flip?) Thus a local latex-system has to be integrated (should be possible) and can be called from a wave. The downside is that we have to edit source-code within a wave - which we do anyway - but we gain the collaborated editing and correcting, commenting - facility. This attempt can be improved in a second step to have a latex->pdf generation service for internal group/wave usage. Such an improvement is technically separated from a wave-enhancement. I note it here, because it's worth enough. Nobody participating the wave have to install latex (or the auxiliary packages), but instead a service has to be available and setup correctly, which arises other (lesser) issues, e.g. connection to server, admin-rights to config service, etc.. But once we have such a service, supporting multiple wave for a whole research group or institute, the full accessibility of a wave is giving: not only easy attend/helpout a new wave/document (without latex setup), creating a new group. Generally the pros can be sum up in gaining time from lesser setup, latex, config-stuff. An Wave- Enhancement has only support the service-interface and the user or the wave itself has to know where (url) the service runs. > There's already been a lot of discussion about how to include inline > equations using robots, which is certainly very useful. @Flip: please, can you outline or quote the mentioned discussions. Emilevictor pointed to watexy, which converts latex $$ to graphics using a web-service afaik. As a computer scientists, this works but not if waves becomes widely available => to much waves will use this services and thus it will be the bottleneck and potentially temporarily not available. I suggest a local or per wave version. Can be a pdf generated from with a python-robot? Nevertheless, this in-place-formula is very very useful for discussing, developing and documenting formulas, use case [4] and contrary to 'editing plain latex sourcecode', I mentioned above. That's because of the nature of latex, where formula are completely human unreadable, but a text is fine to read. Thats because the major fraction is text and not nested macros. So we need a human readable version of a formula. But do we need a latex-compile for that? Lyx is an good example in terms of editing and rendering. The editing has two simultaneous modes, by clicking formula-elements or by evoking '^','_' emulating latex-coding-behavior. The view is the resulting formula in a human-fashion, so a expert-latex-user can write very fast formula in the latex-coding-way but in a human-readable view. I'm quite certain, that Lyx doesn't run latex in background, but have it's own rudimentary renderer, which is suitable enough for a wave. (The latex-language is just used as a convenience for keyboard-input (coding-way) and not for compiling/rendering a pdf or graphic.) The last unmentioned use case [2] for knowledge bases: I think with in- place-formula and general features of a wave such a knowledge base can be created and collaborative developed. In general, the question of porting some latex-fractions (if you like packages) or wiki-fractions will arise more and more, e.g. graphs, diagrams, source code highlighting, mindmap editing etc.. A stirring future environment arises with waves. Cheers, Matthias --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Wave API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
