Recommended way of sharing documents

[de-code]

Currently a DAR archive consists of a directory (with the manifest etc).
If say I want to share a document with someone else, it would be more convenient if I could send a single file (e.g. a zip file). Of course the recipient could extract it. But can Stencila operate on a single file rather than a directory?

[nokome]

Yes, I expect that wanting to share and read/write a single file will probably be a common request, particular for users used to Word and Excel. That capability is currently not there but if it's something that is wanted by enough users then it should be fairly straight forward to implement by reading writing to a zip file with a custom extension e.g. project.dar

[michael]

We're aware this is a bit uncommon. But on the other hand making a folder the default for storage shows that the format is really open and accessible. You can plug in Git etc. and even add files to the manifest manually.

@de-code do you think there's a chance people would consider collaborate on a folder? E.g. using Git or Dropbox? How about you?

Alternatively you could still share as a zip file, with the note that people would need to extract the contents before opening.

[de-code]

I agree that the expanded folder structure is good for things like git.

My use case was to draft an interactive chart and send it to my boss that way. Because it uses private data it I can't make it public. We do use Google accounts otherwise and sharing it via Google storage could work too.

[taunsquared]

could there also be a way to view the xml files in a browser? I'm using Stencila to write my thesis and I'd love to share drafts, outlines, etc with folks who aren't using Stencila. If you want a lot of non-coders to use Stencila I think it will make a huge difference to be able to share a final rendered view of the document without asking folks to download an app.

[nokome]

could there also be a way to view the xml files in a browser?

@taunsquared : Yes, that is definitely something we want to have soon! We're working on rendering to static HTML and the stencila/convert repo has converters for a range of formats (although they are still alpha and currently undergoing a bit of refactoring).

[apawlik]

@taunsquared Thanks for testing out Stencila. We are also going to enable soon Stencila Hub which should make sharing much easier.

[stale]

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