Hello Bo - Thanks for your thoughts. I skimmed your pdf but I'll have to give it a fuller read later. In the meantime I wanted to respond to your post.
The lossy .plyx -> .lyx -> .plyx conversion has been the center of all > discussions. > As I envision things, the actual conversion of .plyx -> .lyx -> .plyx would not occur very often and would be naturally discouraged with some sort of warning dialog box in LyX. Basically, somebody would have to explicitly save the .plyx file as a .lyx file. The loss would coincide with the lost manifest.xml file, but if you opend a .plyx file, LyX would hold on to that manifest so it could save your modifications without any loss. For example, how would you bundle and unbundle a file > c:\not-in-document-path\figure.png that can not exist under linux? There > has been two solutions: restricting all bundled files to a document (sub) > directory, or using individual embedding and partial unbundling. Though cross-platform paths are something of an issue, in my suggested implementation this issue is not associated with information loss. LyX would simple unpack the contents of the .plyx file into a temporary directory when it opens the .plyx document. Saving would simply involve saving the document.lyx file, querying the user about updating any of the embeded documents, and packing the folder contents. It seems to me that the key differences between my suggestion and Richard's include: 1. All information about the original file locations are kept in a manifest file. 2. The LyX file is a .plyx file, an archive. Although individuals could easily unpack the file and manage the internals, the user would never be required to deal with the directory structure directly. 3. Partial embedding is achievable by specifying a priority of 0 for the embeded file. This would tell LyX that it must retrieve the file from one of the external paths. I've tried to write a decent specification in my original attachment, but I'm sure that most of my ideas are much better formulated in my head that what I've written down, so please feel free to ask if the specifics seem dubious. David
