Sounds like a great project. We are a small (2 person) company working in mathematical optimisation, and we would like to be able to use XWiki for requirements capture, logging issues, developing documentation and similar. We often need to include equations and the like in our documents. I love LaTeX, but nobody else I know really gets it, so we end up using (yuk!) MS Word and (ugh!) Sharepoint. Would love to be able to contribute to the project, but at present the workload is about 6+ days per week due to overlapping projects... so we have *no* time to spare just now. Maybe later in the year I could help. Tim Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:

Hi everybody,

On the mailing lists, we noticed several people trying to use XWiki in academic environments, requesting features such as support for mathematical equations or support for LaTeX.

We took some time to design a product that would be great for writing scientific papers, identifying some important features, and some "would be nice to have" features. You can see the current design proposal at http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/SPAWN (feel free to send comment on the mailing list).

Given the fact that this is not a product which can easily be sold, and that there are other more critical projects to work on for the moment, the core XWiki developers cannot dedicate much time on it. This is why we need help from the community. Whoever would like to use this product, and has the power and knowledge to work on in, please help us.

If you are in an university as a student, you can propose one of the sub-applications as a project for one of your classes. If you are a teacher, you can propose some sub-applications as student projects. We can help with coordination, more detailed description/requirements, question answering, code review, etc.

Some of the features require mostly programming skills, while others require more advanced research skills, like the positioned comments in a dynamic text (adapting some sequence alignment algorithms from bioinformatics seems the best idea for the moment, but also some fuzzy systems theory could be applied), or an automatic merge algorithm based on Operational Transformations, so some publications can come out of this, too.

If we gather a few volunteers, I'll make the necessary Jira setup and mark the product as active.

Regards, The XWiki dev team _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users

-- Tim Chippington Derrick Chippington Derrick Consultants Ltd Tel: 01276 508949 Mob: 07971 997948 http://www.chippingtonderrick.co.uk

Re the Latex export, here's the plan: we're currently working on a new architectural version of the xwiki rendering mechanism. The new mechanism will be able to use tools like Maven Doxia which already has a Latex sink, this means that we'll get the latex export for free when we've finished that migration. Of course if the community can help with the new xwiki rendering mechanism that'll speed up things. Thanks -Vincent On Feb 6, 2008, at 3:49 PM, Jan Kodera wrote:

Hi, I used XWiki for my diploma thesis. I mean, my teacher was checking my progress in xwiki. I used following schema. Every chapter was one wiki page. There was one page, where were all links to chapters. Some sort of main page.

When the chapter is in one page, makes comments is easy. You know the context, so it clear what you want comment.

What I missed, was the transfer to LaTex. I had to do this manually. But i think it is better to keep the text in wiki syntax. My point is, you can convert it to LaTex when you want. Why make it incompatible to rest of xwiki?

During my work, i realize that will be great to have special tags like first draw, finished, commented, errors and so on. So you have the summary of your work. These tags will show on the page next to links.

So i think that xwiki is ready for collaboration on the diploma thesis right now. One thesis one space. Maybe first page will be special with some code, but rest of them will be normal xwiki pages. With Latex export and tags you will have what you need. It is my personal opinion, but that is what i missed when i used xwiki for diploma thesis.

Jan

On Feb 6, 2008 2:54 PM, Tim Chippington Derrick <[email protected]

...

wrote: Sounds like a great project. We are a small (2 person) company working in mathematical optimisation, and we would like to be able to use XWiki for requirements capture, logging issues, developing documentation and similar. We often need to include equations and the like in our documents. I love LaTeX, but nobody else I know really gets it, so we end up using (yuk!) MS Word and (ugh!) Sharepoint. Would love to be able to contribute to the project, but at present the workload is about 6+ days per week due to overlapping projects... so we have *no* time to spare just now. Maybe later in the year I could help.

Tim

Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:

...

Hi everybody,

On the mailing lists, we noticed several people trying to use XWiki in academic environments, requesting features such as support for mathematical equations or support for LaTeX.

We took some time to design a product that would be great for writing scientific papers, identifying some important features, and some "would be nice to have" features. You can see the current design proposal at http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/SPAWN (feel free to send comment on the mailing list).

Given the fact that this is not a product which can easily be sold, and that there are other more critical projects to work on for the moment, the core XWiki developers cannot dedicate much time on it. This is why we need help from the community. Whoever would like to use this product, and has the power and knowledge to work on in, please help us.

If you are in an university as a student, you can propose one of the sub-applications as a project for one of your classes. If you are a teacher, you can propose some sub-applications as student projects. We can help with coordination, more detailed description/requirements, question answering, code review, etc.

Some of the features require mostly programming skills, while others require more advanced research skills, like the positioned comments in a dynamic text (adapting some sequence alignment algorithms from bioinformatics seems the best idea for the moment, but also some fuzzy systems theory could be applied), or an automatic merge algorithm based on Operational Transformations, so some publications can come out of this, too.

If we gather a few volunteers, I'll make the necessary Jira setup and mark the product as active.

Regards, The XWiki dev team

Re the Latex export, here's the plan: we're currently working on a new architectural version of the xwiki rendering mechanism. The new mechanism will be able to use tools like Maven Doxia which already has a Latex sink, this means that we'll get the latex export for free when we've finished that migration.

Of course if the community can help with the new xwiki rendering mechanism that'll speed up things.

Thanks -Vincent

First I've seen of this Doxia project (unless I'm brainfarting), this looks very exciting.

On Feb 6, 2008, at 3:49 PM, Jan Kodera wrote:

What I missed, was the transfer to LaTex. I had to do this manually. But i think it is better to keep the text in wiki syntax. My point is, you can convert it to LaTex when you want. Why make it incompatible to rest of xwiki?

I think what you are talking about is similar to Mediawiki's LaTex support. They delimit TeX markup with "<math></math>" tags and it works quite nicely. User level documentation can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula I believe most wiki engines that offer LaTeX support use a similar interface.

On Feb 6, 2008 2:54 PM, Tim Chippington Derrick <[email protected]> wrote:

Sounds like a great project. We are a small (2 person) company working in mathematical optimisation, and we would like to be able to use XWiki for requirements capture, logging issues, developing documentation and similar. We often need to include equations and the like in our documents. I love LaTeX, but nobody else I know really gets it, so we end up using (yuk!) MS Word and (ugh!) Sharepoint. Would love to be able to contribute to the project, but at present the workload is about 6+ days per week due to overlapping projects... so we have *no* time to spare just now. Maybe later in the year I could help.

Tim

Sorry to hear that. I used Sharepoint for one day, and it was the impetus to make me seek out and setup xwiki for our group. You do bring up a good point though. I'd like to reinforce the fact that there are those outside of academia who would like to see LaTeX support. XWiki is very nice for engineering department wikis, and engineers tend to like LaTeX. -Paul D. Grodt