On 10/24/2010 07:53 PM, Richard Heck wrote:
On 10/24/2010 12:31 PM, David Whetstone wrote:
Hi, I'm new here. I only recently joined this list. I've recently
acquired an iPad, and found myself wanting to be able to take notes
with embedded equations and such. AFAICT, no such app yet exists.
Then I thought about LyX. Even if one was not able to compile a
latex document on the ipad, LyX's editing features could still be
very useful. So my question is, how feasible is this?
I've spent the last couple of weeks on an exploratory mission - to
see how hard it would be to build LyX for the iPad. I've gotten as
far as getting a clean build. Completely non-functional, of course.
Much in front-end and support is just stubbed out. But it's a start.
I ask this question now because I've noticed recent comments to the
effect of removing the GUI agnosticism that exists in the LyX
codebase. It's this agnosticism that gave me the idea that it just
might be possible.
I realize it will be a lot of work. But I think LyX for iPad could
occupy a useful niche in the iPad appverse. So tell me, am I wasting
my time?
Well, as you presumably know, LyX depends pretty heavily upon Qt, both
in the frontend and in support. Since Qt does not run on the iPad,
you'd have to replace all of that. This is a massive undertaking. Some
years ago, there was an attempt to produce a Gtk frontend for LyX.
This was at a time when the core-gui stuff was much less entangled
than it is now.
This is not true. The core and gui stuff was very much more entangled at
this time than it is now... lots of glue glue code everywhere. Nowadays,
all you have to do is to rewrite frontend/qt4. QtCore is also used in
src/support/ but the project that listed below shows that this is not a
problem. Still, having a ported QtGui is the much easier path of course.
That project was never completed. It'd be hard enough to do if LyX
weren't a moving target.
I think maybe the way to go is to support the fledgling attempts to
port Qt to the iPad. See this thread:
http://lists.trolltech.com/pipermail/qt-interest/2010-April/021359.html
If that were done, then LyX would run no problem.
Cheers,
Abdel.
