As I have been working on sending a Leo outline to a remote computer, I've realized that sending the outline doesn't send any external files or resources. Resources might be css style files, images, or other files that are used by an outline. This is also a problem when you want to simply copy a Leo outline to another computer. For example, when I copy my workbook.leo outline to a new Linux VM, it won't include a lot of @file external files I have used for testing and learning purposes.
If you wanted to work on some program you were developing as a set of external files, you would be out of luck unless you could also zip up the file structure and recreate it on the remote machine. Programs like Word and LibreOffice files are really zip files that contain many project-related files, including images, icons, font descriptors, and of course, a representation of the text itself. It occurs to me that it would be useful to have a project file like that for Leo outlines. I don't know how feasible it would be to find all possible external resources. For example, in a @rst node there might be a reference to an image file, or similarly in a VR3 node (which might use its own private *@image* directive to point to it). But at least it should be easy enough to locate all external files. In reconstructing external files when the project file is opened, there could be a problem with creating the file paths, especially if some of them were absolute. Sometimes they cannot be converted to relative paths, or if they were, the program files might not work because their imports would be wrong after path conversion. An example of a challenging path conversion might be this: The main @file is on Windows, on the D: drive. But it uses another file on the C: drive. Now I want to move the whole project to a Linux machine. How should these paths be converted? Perhaps only certain projects could be made to work. Perhaps others would need to be restructured. A lot of thought will be needed to work out the details. But I think it would be worthwhile. Other people must have faced this situation, haven't they? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/0e00c68f-6b52-487a-a1d4-f1cac72de44fn%40googlegroups.com.
