Etienne lepercq wrote:
2009/4/13, Richard Heck <rgh...@bobjweil.com
<mailto:rgh...@bobjweil.com>>:
Etienne lepercq wrote:
I am new to LyX, but not as new to LaTeX : I used Kile for
quiet a few time
now. I would like to use LyX to work with several people on an
article. As LyX is
much more user-friendly than Kile, a pure LaTeX editor, I
convinced my
collaborators to give a try to LyX.
There is te least one thing in LyX (and LaTeX) that is not
easy to handle,
sharing a whole document to make it modifiable by others : one
have to build
an archive with all figures and latex source, collaborators
have to untar
it, open LyX, read/modify/etc... and then... rebuild archive,
send the
archive, etc...
This is counter-productive, not easy to use, it is a pain. One
simple
solution I see for this is to give the ability to LyX to open,
say .tar
archives, with a specific tree inside (.yx sources, then
figures/allFigures.Whatever or something). Such archive could
be called
.lyxZ files ;-)
Does such feature exist already ? I searched over
FAQ/Documentation/Asked on
#LyX but did not find anything more than : two implementations
were made
once, but as nobody could say which was the best... none were
released !!
This is not _that_ complex to implement, but is there a way to
have such
feature now, or is there a way to at least release one
relatively-good
implementation ?
I agree with you that there is a way to do this that makes it
quite simple, both to implement and to use. But it imposes
restrictions on where you can put files, since you can't (and
don't want to) untar to arbitrary locations in the filesystem.
This bothered some people. And so it was disagreements over how to
manage these sorts of issues that led to our not releasing
anything. To my mind, this was a perfect example of the good being
sacrificed for the non-existent best, but, well, I'd really rather
not have that battle again.
So, at present, the tar-untar routine is about all we can do.
That said, if enough USERs thought the kind of facility you have
mentioned here was worth implementing, I'd be willing to resurrect
the work I did before and make it functional.
Richard
I _really_ think this is a must have: I know someone else that is
willing to work with LyX and propose it to her teacher, but having to
tar/untar ... will make it _very_ difficult to accept.
Of course, you are right about the problem of where to untar temporary
files (as with this approach, I think un-tared files should be
considered as temporary files from the user's point of view) but
currently LyX _does_ use temporary files when working with an unsaved
document !
That's precisely what my old implementation did: untar to the temporary
directory.
I think that preserving the same temporary path is not decreasing the
quality of LyX, and adds a good feature (for some people, a must have,
when compared to the workflow some have when working with WYSIWYG
applications like OOo or MS-Word).
Yes, this model is similar to OOo, etc. Images and the like get
"embedded" within the document and lose touch with where they came from.
But it's a familiar model.
Does such feature-request be proposed (once again ;-) ) in the dev ML
to better know if your previous work may be merged now, or if the same
disagreements still exist ?
At least in some quarters, these worries still exist.
On the other hand, I think Vincent was working on this problem a while
ago. I don't know how far he got.
Richard
