On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 12:09 AM, Tommaso Cucinotta <tomm...@lyx.org> wrote: >> OTOH interactive LyX seems to be really worth and requested feature while the >> chat looks more like a toy with the aroma of the word "bloat" around (sorry >> for >> the punch :) > > I'm not sure here: AFAICS, I'd see myself more needing the chat, for > discussing > ideas with colleagues *live*. The interactive editing is something that > crosses > with version control. I mean, I've been writing papers over CVS, SVN and GIT, > and I couldn't really see the problem with the classical way of handling the > interactions and conflicts in these systems. Actually, being capable of > handling > the editing and commits/conflicts resolution *off-line* is valuable as well. > I must admit that I share Pavel's sentiment: I'm not sure how much the community needs/requires a chatting function in LyX. But I was thinking of possibly a cheap workaround: Why not communicate with images?
If http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/7839 gets included in base LyX, then it should be much easier to create an LFUN that allows to convert a document to PDF, pass it through pdfcrop (or similar), transform it into a bitmap image and copy it to the clipboard. A bit in the style of Instant Preview. Then the user could insert the resulting image in any chatting application that supports images (I would suspect Pidgin does). As a perk we could check if it would be possible to embed the LyX code that produced the image into the image metadata, and teach LyX to recognize such metadata: If so, then the receiving user could insert the image in LyX and LyX would automatically re-integrate the code into the document. If an image-based approach is adopted, this would remove the need to either implement chat in LyX or implement a LyX buffer in a chat client. Both seem awkward and difficult to achieve. Anyways, a wild idea. Regards, Liviu
