Certainly this would be risky when writing something like a math paper, but outliners all have this feature and are well used and appreciated. As far as testing goes, it should not be hard to devise a "logic tester" to flag each time a \ref for a Lemma, Proposition, Theorem, etc., occurred before the statement. That would handle most serious rearrangement errors, the kind of tragic mistake that can occur at 3 am when very sleepy! Time Machine gives us all decent version control.
On 1/30/08, at 3:29 , Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:18 AM, Jenny Harrison wrote:
Yeh, I am still here. What a dream come true this would be! I don't see how split windows would give a work around for dragging and dropping sections.
-Jenny
On 1/30/08, at 2:58 , Jacob Rus wrote:
Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
Actually what would be even nicer, for me, would be to be able to get an outline of your whole project, essentially listing the table of contents, regardless of how many files the project is split into, and then to be able to simply drag and drop sections around to rearrange things. But I am probably just daydreaming.
Yeah. Jenny (and perhaps others) were talking about this a year ago, but it somehow still hasn't happened. If someone builds such a thing, I'll gladly buy them a beer. :)
Part of the reason it still hasn't happened, apart from my almost zero free time to invest in TextMate programming for at least the last 6 months or so, is what seems to me to be the destructiveness of the whole thing. We are moving vast amounts of text around, possibly across multiple files, and it seems to me it would be hard to test whether the right thing happened. This is why I have been hesitant to do something like that (apart from the other reasons preventing me from doing it).
If everyone was using a version control system on all their tex files/projects, I might be less worried about it. I envisioned this as an HTML tree of the document, with those little triangles used for expanding or hiding the subtrees like in the bundle editor, and then drag and dropping sections around and tracking the thing via javascript. Should not be too hard once we have a reliable way to read the whole project in and get the overall structure figured out correctly and reliably.