Note-sharing is not a new idea, but it seems to have not been implemented yet. The basic ideas are that users of Tomboy should be able to get notes from others, give others their own notes, possibly sync them, resolve conflicts (as with synchronization), and be able to limit what notes are shared. Nobody seems to have mentioned real-time collaborative editing, but I don’t think it’s a good idea at this point, either.

I think there is not all that much that needs to be changed to allow sharing. Essentially, one must be able to synchronize subsets of notes, rather than all notes, and synchronize them in different locations (perhaps multiple). notebooks have been implemented, and they do a decent job of grouping notes, but they don’t add all that much functionally. I think users should be able to sync single notes, notebooks, or all notes with various locations. By doing so, I could keep all of my notes synchronized with my Ubuntu One account, and also sync my notebook for course notes to another server. My classmates can have an account with this other server, and by syncing with it we are sharing notes. If there’s a conflict, Tomboy should solve it in the simplest way possible (maybe prefix the conflicting lines with the username of the author?), or allow a user to launch an external diffing tool, such as Meld or WinDiff.

I’m sure there are issues I haven’t thought about too hard, such as how to deal with links to notes that don’t exist (e.g. outside of a shared notebook), what happens when users change, say, notebook names, Tomboy version or plugin mismatches, etc. But on the surface it seems that expanding synchronization to allow for syncing subsets of notes will allow for simple sharing.

I found, however, that there is another (and perhaps the intended) way to do it! You can create a command for each individual CJK environment you will need, and use them as needed. For example:


\newcommand{\zht}[1]{\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{bsmi}#1\end{CJK}}
\newcommand{\zhs}[1]{\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gbsn}#1\end{CJK}}
\newcommand{\zh}[4]{\zht{#1}/\zhs{#2} (\emph{#3}) ``#4''}


The \zht command is for traditional chinese characters, the \zhs is for simplified, and the \zh uses both (eg to define a word using both variants in hanzi, a transliteration, and a gloss). For example,
\zh{藝術}{艺术}{\yi4 \shu4}{art}
will produce
藝術/艺术 (yì shù) “art”
This works great, except that you have to use one of these tags every time you want to switch to a different character set.

NB: When using this method the very first line is not displayed. I got around this by having a dummy line near the top of the document. For example:
\zht{} % Dummy environment to get around display bug.
\zht{藝術} % Now this will be displayed.

Goals of the project include:

• allowing plugins for import and export formats and display settings
• allowing users to query not just by word, but also by source and target languages, dictionary, and more
• running glot as a desktop application, command-line application, or web server

These goals are far-reaching, but likely attainable.

The project is currently run by me and my good friend Mike. We’ve just started, so there isn’t much to show yet, but we’ll be developing along the “release early, release often” mantra, so features will be added incrementally.

I also recently found a blog post about embedding python in LaTeX files. Using this with CairoPlot, it is easy to put the chart-producing code directly in my .tex files and compile. This reduces the extra step of making separate python scripts to produce these charts. Here is some sample code from a paper I’m currently writing:

\begin{python}
import cairoplot
cairoplot.vertical_bar_plot(
'dat/initial-grammar-stats.ps',
[ [0.87, 0.82], [0.83, 0.50], [0.70, 0.11] ],
340, 280, background = None, border = 10, grid = True,
x_labels = ['Parses', 'Generates', 'Generates Original'],
y_labels = ['%d%%' % i for i in range(0,110,10)],
y_bounds = (0,1) )
print(r'\includegraphics{dat/initial-grammar-stats.ps}')
\end{python}

I do have some gripes about python.sty, though. I have to remember to use the latex command with the “–shell-escape” option. Also, it produces files for the python code, stderr and stdout output, and I don’t particularly care for the directory getting cluttered up with temporary files. Because of these annoyances, I might forgo the python.sty method and just keep a python script that generates all the charts.

Orange, red, and yellow maple leaves fallen to the stone walkway at a temple in Fukuoka

Homepage of Michael Wayne Goodman, computational linguist at the University of Washington.