1. Introduction#
rivt is a software project that faciliates reuse and community improvement of engineering documents. Writing engineering documents typically involves text, tables, diagrams, equations and calculations from a variety of sources. Although software combining these elements is available, reusing an arbitrary document is generally difficult because of the following limitations:
documents are divided among many incompatible programs
newer documents are inaccessible without frequently updating software
update costs are high
software is limited to specific platforms
collaboration and version control is limited
report generation features are limited
As an open source project, rivt addresses these limitations. The table below compares it with other representative software:
Table 1 - Reuseable Features Comparison
Program |
Rep [1] |
Ver [2] |
Txt [3] |
Comp [4] |
CP [5] |
Collab [6] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Matlab |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
Mathcad |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
Mathematica |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
Cloud SaaS |
some |
some |
no |
no |
yes |
some |
Jupyter |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
yes |
rivt |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |