Recent changes to feature-requests

Add to CTAN

Gustav W Delius — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 15:32:49 -0000

It would be good to have this in CTAN. The competing (and more complex) package "changes" is in CTAN already, see http://ctan.org/pkg/changes
Having the package in CTAN makes it easier for people, for example users of MiKTeX, to install and update the package.

graphical LaTeX diff

Felix Salfner — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:47:52 -0000

It would be nice if there was some diff tool that
compares two LaTeX source versions and marks changes
using \add \remove and \change commands.

The goal of this tool is that differences between two
LaTeX files could be highlighted and seen in DVI!

Maybe, this could be achieved by using UNIX diff but
I'm not sure whether UNIX diff only works on per-line
basis which is not sufficient in our case ....

write LaTeX documentation

Felix Salfner — Wed, 31 May 2006 21:38:49 -0000

LaTeX packages are usually equipped with a LaTeX
documentation document. This is missing ...

Once available, the package could also be uploaded to
CTAN ...

acceptChanges.py: Separate parser from rest

Felix Salfner — Wed, 31 May 2006 08:29:26 -0000

acceptChanges.py contains both: command line processing
and the parser. If the parser is to be used by other
programs (e.g., some frontend) it should be made a
separate python module.

acceptChanges frontend: Cross-platform Java frontend

Felix Salfner — Wed, 31 May 2006 08:26:46 -0000

In order to provide cross-platform support, I suggest
that a Java-based frontend should be developed.

The core functionality should include:

- open / save / save as ... file actions
- filtering of trackchanges:
o process only commands with certain initials:
this enables that a user can accept / reject
changes of himself/herself or of another
dedicated user
o process only a selection of commands:
for example: only \note and \annote commands
should be processed
- a button to accept all changes/adds/removes
- a button to reject all changes/adds/removes
- a button to accept the selected changes/adds/removes
- a button to reject the selected changes/adds/removes
- a button to remove all notes/annotes
- a button to remove the selected notes/annotes

In order to select changes quick and easy, the entire
document has to be presented and changes must be
highlighted.

My idea was to add a checkbox to each change command
such that the user can go over the document and simply
select the changes with the mouse.
An alternative to a checkbox would be to present
changes like links on a webpage: the user can directly
click on the text to select / deselect it. Once
selected the text must change color.

The optimum presentation would be that the frontend
interacts with a DVI viewer! The user could go over the
DVI document, click on a marked change and the GUI
would jump to the appropriate position in the
source.... but that's maybe too much ...

acceptChanges backend: export parsed text as XML file

Felix Salfner — Wed, 31 May 2006 08:08:00 -0000

It would be nice, if the acceptChanges backend would
create an XML-file such that various frontends could
easily process it.

My suggestion is to use something like:

...
<document>
<normalText> ..... </normalText>
<addCommand>
<initials>FS</initials>
<newText>new text ...</newText>
</addCommand>
<normalText> ..... </normalText>
<changeCommand>
<originalText>old text</originalText>
<newText>new text</newText>
</changeCommand>
<normalText>.....</normalText>
</document>

the XML-schema looks quite easy and the XML-overhead
seems to be acceptable.