On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> >>>>> "chr" == chr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> >> I am not very fond of distributing HTML pages as documentation in
> >> LyX. I'd agree to drop the FAQ from LyX now and replace it with a
> >> version converted from the wiki when we know how to do that.
>
> chr> Ok (I'm starting to remember now). Would you say the same holds
> chr> for all the documenation (except that we should keep them as
> chr> .lyx-files for now).
>
> I do not think that the complicated docs (like userguide) can be
> represented in wiki markup. Therefore I'd (personally) stick with FAQ
> for now.
[Sorry for my late reply, I forgot this mail in my 'postponed' folder.]
Um.. I don't think anyone has suggested that for the userguide. Could you
give an example of another document that is "complicated"?
But in general I agree with you: If the document comtains advanced
typography, or lots of figures/formulas, it should definitely *not* be a
wiki page. We should only "wikify" stuff that is mostly text and where it
is primarly the content that matters - not how it looks. Nor when it
might be of interest to use it as an example of a .lyx-document.
It would be nicer to be able to use LyX for editing these documents.. if I
can dream for a little while, we'd have a system with two versions of each
document: "official" and "draft" where
- The official version comes installed with LyX, it's read-only
- The draft version resides online and is under version control,
where more or less everyone can make changes and comit them.
In addition to users being able to read the "official" version of e.g.
Reference.lyx using LyX, they should also be able to do the following:
* The user decides to make a minor addition and clicks on
Help->Online drafts->Download->Reference.lyx
which causes LyX to download (actually more like check out) the latest
"draft" version of Reference.lyx that is stored online somewhere.
* The user can now read/edit this draft version
* the user can upload (actually more like commit) the draft version
Before a new release of LyX, we would need to compare the "official" and
the "draft" to see what should be incorporated into "official". I know we
might not have the tools to do this efficiently yet though.
Anyway, it'd be a nice dream if it was possible to use LyX to
collaboratively make changes to the documentation. However, I expect this
won't work out so easily in practice. For one, documents such as the
UserGuide.lyx probably shouldn't be messed with by just any user. So in
that respect this system would only be useful for making it easy for
user's to 'submit' small suggestions as 'patches'.
Oh, enough with the dreaming now.
> >> We have to eat our dog food in some way. If LyX is not suitable to
> >> read documents on screen we have a problem.
>
> chr> It's been a while since I actually used LyX to be honest, but I
> chr> have a vague memory of it not being that fun to read stuff in
> chr> LyX. Cant' remember why though.. one issue had to do with
> chr> horizontal scrolling and long formulas I think.
>
> This should not be a problem with what we want to do.
Eh... I thought you asked why LyX is unsuitable for reading documents
with? Anyway, I just wanted to say that I think there are reasons why LyX
is less good for browsing documentation. (OTOH, I think it's awesome as an
authoring tool).
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
