On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, rgheck wrote:
I was thinking more in terms of a browser-based frontend communicating
via AJAX with a LyX instance running on a server. But what you're
suggesting makes sense.
I had a different idea, though, too. What if the LyX document itself
were stored on a server somewhere? It wouldn't be that hard to allow
such documents to be opened. (I'm actually kind of surprised I can't
enter "http://frege.brown.edu/font.lyx"; into our file dialog.
That sounds a lot like my old (not yet dead idea) of storing/editing LyX
documents on a wiki. You would be able to open the "wiki pages"
(documents) from LyX and edit them properly. When saving, it goes back to
the server. However, simple editing can also be made possible directly
through the wiki, with a crude version shown in the browser. Finally it'd
be possible to tell the server to use LyX to directly produce a
PDF-version of the document.
I'm primarily waiting for the LyX file format to migrate to XML.
As an aside, it is already possible to use an extension to the wiki that
takes wiki pages, convert them to XML, converts that into LaTeX and
finally runs LaTeX on the output to produce a PDF. It works pretty well.
Some aspects of collaboration can be _greatly_ increased by making it very
easy for people to modify the document, so the idea certainly has
potential. However, one thing I'm slowly learning from experience with the
wiki and other collaboratively work (e.g. sw development) is that support
from tools is extremely helpful for tasks such as:
* Remembering and accessing previous revisions (our wiki sucks at this)
* Dealing with merges
* Dealing branching/forking of documents
I think that what's basically needed is a distributed VCS as a backend,
with LyX (and wiki) support for dealing intelligently with the documents.
It would be quite hard to get it all. On the other hand, a lot of people
would be _really_ happy with just the following ability:
* Click edit on a "LyX page" on the server
* Be able to edit the document
* Save changes back to the server
This is really what the a wiki page is. With pmwiki-mode for emacs I've
implemented this functionality (it's relatively easy really[*]), and you
can get a huge increase in efficiency.
Just wish I had the time to do this with LyX, but I'm hoping for the
implementation to be simplier with the XML transition.
regards
/Christian
[*] It'd probably be quite easy to implement the straight forward aspects
of the above for single files. You could just have a wrapper script that
downloads the file, launches LyX and when LyX is done pushes the file back
to the server. I might be able to design/implement/deploy the basic
functionality for LyX on a Linux system in a few hours against our wiki
server. However, this would be in a very simple way, so if people start
using it, the feature requests would probably make the whole thing a
monster -- functionality is added on an unsuitable framework. Take the
security aspects for instance... you don't want to get spammed in your
document.
Having said the above, I think that building upon a distributed VCS might
be a way to start with a more suitable framework. Still, before doing
it I think some serious thinking of the use cases and alternative paths
need to done.
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
