A.2 Motivations#

[1] Background#

rivt is an open source software project that simplifies sharing and reuse of engineering documents. This has always been a challenge because engineering documents are complex. They may include text, images, tables, calculations, models and computer code. The market response to engineering document software has been to develop incompatible, siloed programs with barrriers to sharing and reuse that include:

incompatible documents across programs
costly software updates that are backward incompatible
software limited to specific platforms
limited version control
limited report generation
limited collaboration

rivt is designed to address these barriers as both a compliment and replacement to existing software. The table below summarizes and compares limitations between different programs.

Software Comparison

Program	Report [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	limited	no	no	no	yes	limited
Excel	limited	no	no	yes	no	yes
Jupyter	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes
rivt	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes

[2] Use Cases#

The primary use case for rivt is writing and sharing document source files, and publishing engineering documents in text, PDF or HTML formats. A second use case is as a front or back end for pre- and post-processing data from other software. A third use case is real-time collaboration using interfaces like VSCode, Codespaces, Firebase, Gitpod or replit.

Engineering documents for:
internal communication
research documentation
government permits
technical reports
funding applications
homework

Front and back ends for:
software pre- and post-processing
visualization
instrumentation

Collaboration for:
teaching
presentations
document preparation