mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[David Allouche <address@hidden>]

Javier Arantegui wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> This may be (or not) a mad suggestion. Would it be possible to make TeXmacs 
> a 
> "Collaborative editor" (1)? Something like Gobby (2) or SubEthaEdit (3). 
> It's 
> obvious that most of us work with other people and that the management of 
> different versions of a document is quite difficult.
> 
> When several people work with the same document simultaneously is very 
> difficult to mantain all the versions of the document synchronised. This 
> can 
> be solved, at least partially, using collaborative editors.

You can find an introduction to this problem, and some useful
references, on my blog: http://ddaa.net/blog/gobby-first-look

This blog is a bit old (almost one year), so it does not reflect the
current status of the software projects.

> All the existing collaborative editors are just for text, as the ones I 
> mentioned before. I know that some work is being done in this direction by 
> the programmers of AbiWord (4). There is a Flash screencast showing the 
> capabilities of AbiWord (5). It seems that they use one of the libraries of 
> Gobby to do that, one called libobby.

That sounds surprising. What makes you think that Abiword uses libobby?

Libobby is just about real-time sharing of plain-text buffers, although
the documentation claims that the library could easily be adapted to
other data models.

On the other hand, Abiword tackled a larger problem (allowing offline
editing as well) and needs more structure. As far as I know, they built
on their extant document versioning infrastructure.

> Wouldn't be amazing or not if TeXmacs could be a collaborative editor? This 
> could make it a definitive killer application. Frankly, I don't know even 
> if 
> this is possible or not. But, this is the reason of the Subject line.

This is almost certainly possible. Though defining the commutation
operators on tree structures would probably require some research.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

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