LyX on Android?

[Alessandro Di Federico]

Hi! There was a time when I laughed at those asking about an
Android-version of LyX, first of all because LyX sometimes tends to be
quite RAM-consuming. However the situation evolved quickly and now we
have powerful Android devices, but most importantly tablets.
I think it's time to think something about porting LyX to Android.
Do you think it would be possible? Maybe we could put up some reduced
functionality version.

The first problem would be the absence of LaTeX support in Android,
however there are cloud services able to render LaTeX [1], so maybe we
could think about that. Or maybe we could just allow to export in
LyXHTML, which, if I'm correct doesn't require LaTeX at all.

The last resource would be "you'll render this document on your
desktop", which still I found useful.

Qt is available for Android [2] but I don't know how usable and mature
it is (currently in alpha stage).

What are the other main issues you see?

Ale

[1] https://www.verbosus.com/
[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/

[Richard Heck]

Post by Alessandro Di Federico
Hi! There was a time when I laughed at those asking about an
Android-version of LyX, first of all because LyX sometimes tends to be
quite RAM-consuming. However the situation evolved quickly and now we
have powerful Android devices, but most importantly tablets.
I think it's time to think something about porting LyX to Android.
Do you think it would be possible? Maybe we could put up some reduced
functionality version.

I've also been thinking about this, as I have a new Galaxy 10" tablet
that is very, very cool. I think there is a lot of functionality one
could remove to leave a good, usable editor.

Post by Alessandro Di Federico
The first problem would be the absence of LaTeX support in Android,
however there are cloud services able to render LaTeX [1], so maybe we
could think about that. Or maybe we could just allow to export in
LyXHTML, which, if I'm correct doesn't require LaTeX at all.

I'm thinking mostly in terms of an editor, and less in terms of
something that will produce PDF or XHTML. For that sort of purpose, one
could use another machine. But you are right that exporting XHTML
doesn't required LaTeX. Nor, for that matter, does exporting LaTeX. It's
only compiling LaTeX that needs LaTeX.

As usual, this is a question of available time.

Richard

[Jean-Marc Lasgouttes]

Post by Alessandro Di Federico
Hi! There was a time when I laughed at those asking about an
Android-version of LyX, first of all because LyX sometimes tends to be
quite RAM-consuming. However the situation evolved quickly and now we
have powerful Android devices, but most importantly tablets.
I think it's time to think something about porting LyX to Android.
Do you think it would be possible? Maybe we could put up some reduced
functionality version.

One big difficulty I foresee is the adaptation of the UI. Finger poining
is not the same as mouse.

JMarc

[Guenter Milde]

Post by Alessandro Di Federico
Hi! There was a time when I laughed at those asking about an
Android-version of LyX, first of all because LyX sometimes tends to be
quite RAM-consuming. However the situation evolved quickly and now we
have powerful Android devices, but most importantly tablets.
I think it's time to think something about porting LyX to Android.
Do you think it would be possible? Maybe we could put up some reduced
functionality version.

Not exactly what you were asking about, but as a "very reduced
functionality version", namely a viewer for LyX files you can use elyxer,
the external LyX->HTML converter. This allows to view LyX files on any
device that supports Python and a HTML Browser.

Günter