LyX ⇒ The one missing feature: online collaboration

[Emmeran]

Hi,
I really love LyX. It's a great tool that I use a lot in my studies.
But it can get a little messy, when you try to work on a paper together in a group.

I searched for hours for any plugins or apps that can do this, and I found none: it would be so neat if LyX could do live online collaboration, similar to google docs for example, where two or more people can type at the same time.

[localghost]

For this features suggestion you should contact the developers directly. It is very unlikely that they will read this thread.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[Emmeran]

Well you're probably right, my bad. This board was linked at lyx.org and I didn't look very closely and just assumed that this would be a good place to start.

[DaveG]

this might be a bit off the wall, but have you tried doing it in google wave?

It certainly allows pasting in of latex text, and collaborative editing.
I guess you might want to stick to one blip, but they can be extracted.

enjoy

Dave

ps google wave is now publicly available and has lots of gadgets (like/don't like, voting, sketch boards, etc.)

[Emmeran]

Does it have instant WYSIWYG for latex too? ^^

If I wanted to edit latex code I wouldn't need LyX, would I?

[DaveG]

LyX is a nice way to see (almost) LaTeX code, but a .lyx file is fundamentally a text file. You can open it with a text editor (e.g. Notepad++) and see and change your text. (This is not recommended in case you insert a LaTeX syntax error, which LyX avoids).

Any text file you can collaboratively edit in Wave.

To get a PDF for printing you need to copy the finished text file out of Wave into a local file then call a program to make a PDF.

But you will get very good collaborative editing if everyone can bear to see the latex markup. Perhaps best to concentrate on the text then polish up the markup in LyX. And avoid all the markup in Wave!

Currently this would be the only way to do an extract (at least as far as I am aware), but there are now robots for creating docx and PDF files from waves, so I presume a robot could be written to create a LyX or LaTeX file.

Dave

[Emmeran]

Dave, you obviously haven't understood at all what my thread is about.

Thanks for your replies anyways though.

Of course I know Google Wave and I know the PDF robots. But what I want, let me say it again, is WYSIWYG LaTeX / LyX editing (as provided by LyX) in combination with instant synchronized net collaboration (as provided by Google Wave and many other tools) in one product.

WYSIWYG means "what you see is what you get" - you edit a file and the output will be the same what your editor shows. This is not the case in Google Wave, since I compile the output to get something different then the LaTeX code.
And LyX can't do collaboration (yet). Did that make sense to you?

[meho_r]

Just to mention, LyX isn't actually WYSIWYG but almost WYSIWYG (more precisely, WYSIWYM -- what you see is what you mean). Only some parts are WYSIWYG, like simple mathematical expressions.

One way to collaborate on a project using LyX is using Dropbox or similar service where you may share folders with others. However, this is not real-time collaboration you asked for, but it is worth a try. "Version control" and "Change Tracking" features in LyX could be useful too.

[Emmeran]

Sure, we're using subversion (svn) at the moment. But it's just not the same as live collaboration. Also when conflicts occur it can get pretty messy.

[frabjous]

As you probably know there is a LaTeX editor for Google Docs with a working beta. (Click here.)

Not WYSIWYG, but neither is LyX. (And what LaTeX user really wants WYSIWYG anyway?)