mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Nicolas Girard <address@hidden>]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 12:42:08PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 05:50:56PM +0100, Parrenin Frédéric wrote:
> > A related question is : is there something in texmacs that allow for
> > showing modifications of different author of the same document ?
> > I mean, in M$-Word, you can "Show modification". The new text is in red,
> > and the text deleted in red and strikeouted.
> > It is a very useful feature in many domains.
> > If it is not present in texmacs, is it planned ?
> 
> We already had this wish several times, that is indeed a very useful
> feature. Currently there is not automated way to do it. Well, one
> could always write some Scheme code to this effect... Using macros to
> tag and hilight the modifications is not difficult, the difficult part
> is handling the diffing logic. Since TeXmacs is tree-based, it has
> been told that xmldiff (a Python program) might come handy.
> 
It could be handy...provided .tm files were xml files. Currently it
wouldn't be of any help IMHO.

Let me tell you about a dream that will come true when i can do the same
stuff than what i'm about to do with docbook files:

- for a docbook document d.xml:
  - ask the CVS server if the document has changed since the last check
  - if it has changed:
    - get the two revisions as d.old and d.new
    - call xmldiff -x d.old d.new > diff.xupdate:
        ( -x, --xupdate
              display output in Xupdate xml specification )
    - transform the diff.xupdate
      into revisions in docbook format,
           with some additional informations 
           (date, log entry) given by CVS,
      using an xslt stylesheet,
      and add it to, let's say, revisions.xml

*That's it*
As d.xml already includes revisions.xml, there's a clean separation between
the changes and the associated metadata describing these changes.
Of course, you can imagine as many refinements as you can ; for
instance, you could imagine that all section or all chapter have their
own revisions

All that is possible thanks to the simple fact that docbook is xml,
since xml defines:
- a standard way of associating metadata to data
- a standard way of parsing data and metadata

So all this could be possible if TeXmacs used xml as its file format...
No, it's not that i'm trying to convince you to switch to xml....err,
hem, yes, actually, i'm trying to convince you... sorry !!

Cheers,

Nicolas