[Long Term] New Channel Types

Document channels

TL;DR — As a compromise between a fully-fledged in-app document-editing tool and some way to go beyond markdown. I propose a very simple PDF-display channel.

Hampus — Today at 3:53 yeah, before you know it you've reimplemented Google Docs there are so many features people want when having a WYSYWIG editor for long-form text like that, including real-time collaboration and an edit history and stuff I went down that rabbit hole a long time ago trying to figure out how to implement that into Fluxer I feel like I need a more well-defined scope first :P Lilith — Today at 3:55 halfway to google slides with latex rendering North — Today at 3:55 Collaborative WYSYWIG in a chat app seems misplaced. But I guess I could see value if it was a standalone channel? kulupu sewimonsutatenpo — Today at 3:57 i do agree WYSIWYG is within scope for fluxer given discord has it. i just dunno if a reimplementation of gdocs is worth it Hampus — Today at 3:58 Discord doesn't have what I was referring to though: document channels k_tan — Today at 3:58 sounds great, it would be good support for collaborative works like notion, slack, or asana Hampus — Today at 3:58 i.e., here's a canvas to write on but what if others want to write on it simultaneously? and what if you want to revert to an older revision in history? it just spirals from there

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Lilith — Today at 4:01 hot take Chat apps that build their own implementations or link other implementations of WYSYWIG into their app (looking at you slack, teams, and a few others) all tend to suck. I have yet to see any that don't make the app feel clunky or bogged down Hampus — Today at 4:01 yeah I really don't want to have that, it's just massive scope creep what we could have though is a middle ground where you still write regular messages Lilith — Today at 4:10 Agreed - if we ever do go into the realm of expanded wysiwyg - It will likely just build bridges that other open source projects can use to connect to (not even display in app).

To follow-up on this discussion that took place in the FluxerHQ; I wanted to propose what I think would be a very good middle-ground — A Document channel, as Hampus coined it; which would be a very basic in-app PDF viewer. I know this might sound very lackluster compared to the scope evoked in the discussion (trimmed for your convenience); but hear me out!

0. First off, I think the production cost of an in-app PDF viewer should be very cheap, especially compared to the idea of full-blown collaborative editing; given that Fluxer is a webapp first and most web browsers feature a native PDF viewer (but I might be very wrong on how easy that should be).
1. PDF is probably the most broadly supported format. Pretty much every software in existence has a way of exporting to PDF, be it text apps, drawing software, etc. etc. and if worse comes to worst, everything that is printable can be saved to PDF.
2. I personally think giving users the opportunity to display their end-result rather than offering the tool to create it has the advantage of giving them the freedom to use whatever they need. As Lilith and Hampus highlighted, we are bordering on out-of-scope territory in making a fully-fledged collaborative editor in Fluxer and many other options already exist for that. By giving the ability to simply display PDFs, we give users the possibility of going beyond simple markdown with their own, preferred method. Call me old-school but I absolutely adore LaTeX, and I can't count the number of times I would have wanted to be able to share my nerdiness right there in-app rather than having to host and link to it.
   • The — moderate — downside is that the document channel is only updated as you re-upload the PDF; but I personally don't think that's really a big deal? If it's important enough to be a document rather than a chat, you probably don't want to share it mid-edition.
   • As mentioned the biggest upside to me is the ability for the user to scale their tool to their need. Want a simple text? Write it on LibreOffice and be done with it. Want a portfolio? Export it from your favourite software. Want to work on a full technical book? Host the LaTeX project on git for extensive versioning and collaborative editing. Etc, etc.

Here is a proof of concept of what it could look like

Sorry if the pixelate effects hurts your eyes, I only had a private document on hand :( poc-document-channel