On Oct 25, 2010, at 4:51 AM, Richard Heck wrote: > On 10/25/2010 03:52 AM, Abdelrazak Younes wrote: >> 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. >> > I could be wrong, but I think we now have much more application logic in the > Gui* classes then we did before the removal of all the Controller* classes. > Perhaps alot of that could just be copied over, but it is still more work. > > Anyway, I had a different thought, namely: If what you're looking at is more > of a note-taking application with the ability to handle formulas, then there > is a LOT of LyX that can remain in stub form. You probably don't need tables > or any of the InsetCommand hierarchy. Probably not footnotes, etc. If so, > then the problem becomes at least somewhat easier. Indeed, you might just > want to fork us, as many of the improvements in LyX wouldn't be that relevant > to what you were doing. > > Richard >
Indeed, this is really what I was attempting at the outset - to extract the equation editing pieces from LyX to use in my own app. But once I got into the code a bit and noticed that there was at least some attempt to make LyX GUI agnostic, I got a big head and thought maybe I could port the whole thing. I think I'll take your advice and fall back to my original plan.
