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Free Tools for Collaborative Editing? 96

Posted by Cliff from the one-document-many-authors dept.
zachrahan asks: "I have almost completely removed Microsoft Office from my work-flow. One hurdle remains, though -- sending scientific manuscripts out to colleagues for comments. Everyone I know simply uses MS Word's Track Changes feature for this. To tell the truth, this works quite well. However, I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over. I've been working a bit with Multivalent, which is very promising, but still firmly in alpha. Are there any other free, cross-platform tools for collaborative marking up of PDF or HTML (or other) documents, a la Word's track changes feature?"
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Free Tools for Collaborative Editing? More

Free Tools for Collaborative Editing?

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  • OOo has that feature. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bistronaut ( 267467 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2003 @12:25AM (#6405338) Homepage Journal
    OpenOffice.org Writer does have a track changes [taming-ope...ce-org.com] feature like Word's.

  • CVS? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10, 2003 @12:28AM (#6405358)
    I just use CVS. Probably not what you're looking for but it is great to see who changed what.

    I'm waiting for somebody to write a cross between Hydra on the Mac with CVS-like version control and built-in IM. That would be sweet-o-matic and cool-o-rama. or something. :-)
    • Uh... I don't think you quite get it. Putting your docs in CVS is all well and good (and smart). We do. But that doesn't help a bit with what the poster wants, since CVS doesn't help show changes with binary files. And even if it did, what good is that going to be to you? Heck, even if you used OO.org and stored the doc as uncompressed XML it's not going to help, because you don't want to see the raw data -- you want to see the document.

      More importantly, you want to see the document with revisions so that

  • Best tool for the job (Score:4, Insightful)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @01:05AM (#6405500)
    Is MS Word

    Do you want to waste time screwing with diff and cvs and forcing your colleagues to switch to some complex system or do you want to get your work done?
    • Perhaps his "morality" persuades him to use something other than a product made by a "known criminal"?

    • Re:Best tool for the job (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zulux ( 112259 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @01:35AM (#6405615) Homepage Journal
      Increasingly the cost of Word and the scattered versions is making it less and less of a productive tool.

      When 20% your team can't afford to upgrade to Word XP, 30% is still on Word 97, 10% is on Word for Mac, and 5% have their notmal.dot template taken over by a Windows virus - it's easier to tell everybody to workload OpenOffice 1.1 and call it a day.

      • Word XP documents can be read in Word 97. I don't know anything about the Mac versions.

        On my very first attempt to open a Word document in OpenOffice, it crashed. It reminds me a lot of WordPerfect for Windows 1.0. I crashed it in the first 5 minutes of use too.

        • Try opening anything with Unicode in the Mac version - for instance, any document with any Greek in it (even something as minor as a few mus ( - it's even in Latin-1, for heaven's sake!). Depending upon how the original author encoded it, you may lose information.

          Now, try opening a document with embedded EMF graphics in Office 2000 on a Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer. If there are any lines 1pt wide or smaller, watch them disappear! Now open it in WinXP, and watch them reappear!

          There are version

    • Word is certainly not the best tool for the job if you are editing scientific documents (as the poster indicated).

      The equation editing facilities are frankly laughable and it's ability to do cross referencing and include citations is awful. LaTeX + BibTeX are still streets ahead, even now, compared to Word. Believe me I know I have tried both and Word is pure pain .

      • Once in a while I try to do something in Word 2000. I find lots of quirks. It seems to me that there is a lot of pain in other areas of Word as well.
      • I disagree, but would qualify that. In the Biologic sciences I would argue that the best tool is Word with the Endnote or Reference Manager plug in. It auto-formats your references according to the journal you submit to.

        There is also the cost, if he migrates this way, of that a lot of people, me included, who would go- yah sure dude whatever.... and just ignore him. 2 people give me equall things to do, 1 of which is easy.... the other person is probably out of luck.
    • But he's saving their immortal souls by freeing them from the slavery to the Borg... It's not about technical superiority or day-to-day convenience, it's about changing the world!

      Think about it: if he succeeds, he'll have 20% less hair on his head, a few colleagues less and maybe half the documents prepared - but Bill Gates will be a whopping $2000 poorer!
    • Now go back in your cave and try to grow a brain.

      MS Word may be a usable tool for many things, but it's not at all for anything related to technical writing.

      MS Word is a major PITA when one is inane enough to try to write e.g. a DataSheet with it. Yes, you can do it, but sometimes the formatting goes crazy, the pictures start having a life of their own, the overall typesetting quality is abysimal and, no matter how you massage the document, the end result looks like crap.

      Serban
    • I agree, it just messes things up when you are trying to receive an email from someone and they use a different system.

  • WordPerfect 5.1 - Believe it or not! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10, 2003 @01:19AM (#6405549)
    Yes, I still occasionally need to use WordPerfect 5.1 for this as I've never found better in terms of compatibility. I still have several clients running old DOS machines, who have never needed to upgrade, as all they need is word processing and email. Writers can be quite anachronistic about the whole thing. The tracking functionality needs some enhancements via scripting but, really, there little limit to what can be implemented.

    In a way, WP 5.1's embedded codes are really just tags. Personally, I consider the early DOS version of WordPerfect to be the best text editor ever developed and the obvious predecessor to markup lanquages, including SGML and HTML.

    WP also exports to, and is importable by every app I've every run across. This is largely due to it's being a standard in the office for so many years.

    Of course, for people used to graphical UI's, it does look old school but it's quite small and very fast. Of course, the graphical version can be used, if necessary. ;~)

    As for PDF, it's a closed and owned standard that is entirely unsuited to usability. Anyways, I digress ...
  • In MS Office 2003 the editing features only get better. They are a little easier to use, a lot easier to see/read, and you can leave voice comments as well as other things in line with the file.

    There is even a new "reading mode" that allows you to read documents more easily and correct them. It works great for correcting friends papers or having them do the same to mine.
    • voice comments as well as other things in line with the file

      Sounds to me like another gimmick... unless you happen to be a collabrative song writer I don't see what benefit you could get from including a voice clip, which has to be played seperatly, against text, which is being read anyway.

      I do see the fact that you can't search the document for anything in voice clips, it bloats the file, and is just plain awkward to use.
    • In MS Office 2003 the editing features only get better.
      Well, it's not as though they can get any worse.

  • try Hydra for realtime internet collaboration (Score:5, Informative)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @01:30AM (#6405598)
    It's mac only, but this is one of the niftiest little bits of freeware I've seen in a while.

    You can have as many people as you like simultaneously editing the same file in realtime, with everyone's changes showing up with color coded highlights.
    • <aol />

      Hydra is fantastic -- check it out [globalse.org].

      Editing documents in groups can be a challenge. Versioning systems like cvs or subversion can help your group to keep a consistent copy of your document, but don't go that extra mile. Wouldn't it be great to edit the same document, live, in realtime, together with everyone in your group?

      Time for Hydra
      With Hydra you can. The idea of collaborative editing has been researched for years, with notable results. But now for the first time it has been implement

  • A little time ago, when I got to play with Adobe Acrobat (I tried to edit existing PDFs - that's an odyssey kind of errand to do!), I find out, is that Adobe has integrated some collaboration features into PDF.

    You can comment on a document, attach notes to it, and if the document is going through e.g. a whole department (like paper files in a gov't department), everyone gets to get their own color, etc., to distinguish who made changes.

    The original content stays, as it is, and all of these notes etc. can
    • Yeah you're not wrong. PDFs do support things like adding post-it notes to the pages. I really wish xpdf or something would get support for that. The only catch is I'm not sure if its part of the PDF standard or a proprietary Adobe embrace and extend of their own standard.

      Even something dead simple like saving a separate text file with the page number and coordinates of the text note would nearly solve the problem for xpdf users.

    • (OT/thread, I know... but on topic in context of the parent.)

      Editing PDF files isn't that painful in and of itself. Acrobat just isn't the tool to do it. If you converted it from another source than .jpg, you should be able to open it up in Pagemaker or Quark and be just fine.

      If you have to mark it up as a form for web submission, on the other hand, I feel your pain. :(

  • A little off the wall.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by .milfox ( 75510 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @01:44AM (#6405642)
    But what about a Wiki? :P

    The one I use, WikiTikiTavi (tavi.sourceforge.net) has pretty good revision control featuers as well.

    I'm not sure if this fits your needs, but for a couple group papers I've had to write, once I taught the folks in my group how to use a wiki, it seemed to work pretty well for writing.
    • I agree, it would be a bit of a shift in thinking, but you are right, a Wiki is much better for this than emailing Word docs around.

      I use TikiWiki (tikiwiki.org) and it has history with rollback and permissioning to give you whatever control you seek. It has a *ton* of other features as well, but you can turn off all the stuff you don't need and just run a Wiki with it.

  • You probably... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    should've considered your needs before even looking to remove MS Office from your workflow.

    If I were your boss and I learned that you removed MS Office just because you hate MS, and now are looking to change everyone's life to match your crusade, i'd wish you luck on the unemployment line.

  • Is this really what's needed now-a-days: another way to avoid interacting with people and calling it work? The best way to collaborate with others is to sit down with them in person, or at least on the phone or live via tele- or video conference.

    When I started working at Boeing in Seattle, the veteran designers told me stories of "back in the day" when you'd toss your part drawings over to the stress engineers and they'd return them marked up. They'd go back and forth like this with very little face-to-

    • Face to face collaboration is sometimes very productive, but not always. Sometimes it's a complete waste of everybody's time, and often it really is less productive than people working together, independently. This is especially true when it comes to things like creating an original document or design.

      One problem is that face to face collaboration often doesn't give people the same time to think and reflect on the work as sequential document or email-based collaboration. So you end up with very vocally
    • And when the people you're collaborating with are a client 300 miles and one state away? Do you know how costly "face-time" can be then?

      Yes, the "right-way", according to you here, can involve a 3-hr car ride at the expense of said client to discuss a single document (for what can be *hours* with the right type/amount of people collaborating) and a 3-hr drive back.

      When non-face-time collaboration (phone, email, etc) can work, why spend the time and money on face-time?

  • rcs (Score:3, Informative)

    by HalfFlat ( 121672 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:13AM (#6405886)
    What I do personally is use rcs on the TeX files for maths papers as they're being passed around and amended.

    Other authors may or may not use rcs. The beauty of it all is that it doesn't matter: as soon as I receive a new version, I can check it in, or incorporate my own changes, and have a record of every version of the document that has been circulated electronically among the authors.

    I imagine a similar solution using cvs or subversion would work fine for multi-file documents.

    The key point, again, is that it doesn't matter so much what the other authors do. There needn't be a single solution for everybody, although I imagine webdav and subversion would be kind of cute.

    The problem: broken text editors that don't respect line breaks, but instead freely reformat paragraphs. This is a problem not only for diffs, but also for TeX comments ('%' marks the rest of the line as a comment.) The only solution to this, sadly, is to encourage people to use an editor which is not broken in this way. Given that it can munge TeX comments, it's a good thing to change regardless.

  • How about RCS? (Score:2, Informative)

    by oobar ( 600154 )
    If the files are text files, you could probably do worse than RCS -- you know, the Revision Control System?

    Say you have a file foo.txt. Start a repository by running ci -l foo.txt. This should ask you for a description of the file and will create foo.txt,v Now send your file to your peers, have them make changes and send the file back to you. When you receive their file, check it in with ci and give it a ChangeLog-type description. Then you can see what changes they made with rcsdiff, maintain your ow
  • My own experience on this very field is this: let everyone write TeX, LaTeX and PostScript using her favourite text editor (vi or Emacs) and use Concurrent Versions System (CVS) to seamlessly combine it all together. On the CVS server have makefiles and use GNU make(1) to generate PostScript (using tex(1) and dvips(1)--remember to use scalable PostScript Type 1 fonts for better results with resolutions over 600dpi) and PDF (using pdftex(1)). That way you have a completely free-software solution, and, as a n
    • Remember that Microsoft Office, unlike TeX, is not a type setting system, but merely an office grade "word processor."

      Heaven forbids that somebody might use a "word processor" to *gasp* process words! Why process words with a "word processor" when you can simply use a typesetting system. Is it because software that was designed to track concurrent changes to sourcecode offers more *features* than using something as lowly as a word processor's track-changes feature? (read paragraph as it is intended, to be

      • If your colleagues are all familiar with LaTeX and CVS, then use MS Word...
        Where is the "logic nazi" when you need him?

        Actually I've found it best to do my tech docs (with equations) in Latex and distribute pdfs in the real world. You wouldn't believe the fscking numbnuts who inadvertently fork up a word file and then forward it on. Makes you look like a moron.

      • If your colleagues are all familiar with LaTeX and CVS, then use MS Word, because when you graduate from college, you'll realize that nobody in the *real world* uses LaTeX and CVS (programmers know CVS, researchers know LaTeX).

        Nice try, Mr. Gates!

    • Did you actually read what you wrote? I took this to be a humorous comment until about half way through when I realized you were serious. Given the MS Office bias we see in the article, I doubt the average computer user the poster suggests would be able to understand (much less be productive with) the sophisticated combination of software you present as a solution. Starting from MS Office, I wouldn't expect anyone in this scenario to migrate to the process you recommend.

      Granted, the advice appears technic

      • Did you actually read what you wrote?

        Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have. (This is probably the most stupid question I have ever answered.)

        Given the MS Office bias we see in the article, I doubt the average computer user the poster suggests would be able to understand (much less be productive with) the sophisticated combination of software you present as a solution.

        Please forgive me that I (quite foolishly, as you imply) assumed that those are in fact intelligent and literate people.

        • <sigh> Trollish, but I'll bite...

          Did you actually read what you wrote?

          Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have. (This is probably the most stupid question I have ever answered.)

          You are keen to impress upon us your intelligence, but I see little insight in your comments. Although apparently not obvious to you, this was a rhetorical statement, intended not to find fact, but to place perspective on my following comments through linguistic turn.

          Please forgive me that I (quite foolishl

  • Here at the Yucca Mountain Project [doe.gov], we are evaluating an Open Source application called eNote [ornl.gov] . To use it, you need a web server that can run Perl.

    Although editing is straightforward, the application is not so much for collaborative editing as it is for collaborative documentation of work and data. Here is the first paragraph from the eNote web site:

    An electronic R&D Notebook is the electronic equivalent of a paper research notebook. Instead of recording information on paper, the sketches, text,

    • As one of the authors of eNote, I would say that it is not well suited to the kind of markup that you can get via MS Word's Track Changes feature. The current version of eNote has grown from more modest roots and consequently is a rather messy Perl program.

      The next generation eNote (which will not be ready for a while), will be more full featured, but will require Java on the client (Webstart). eNote2 isn't being developed by me, but I am developng a notebook client targets at the bioinformatics industry

  • OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:19AM (#6406435)

    This is off-topic, I know; but based on the story author's question, I'm curious what scientific field he/she is in. And maybe other people here can comment on this question too. I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter. The Physical Review, the Astrophysical Journal, etc. etc., go out of their way to discourage submission of papers using Word, and encourage (and, to some extent, facilitate) the use of TeX/LaTeX instead. Drop in on xxx.lanl.gov/arxiv.org, and nearly all of the papers in the physics and astrophysics sections will have been submitted in TeX/LaTeX.

    So I'm curious -- what scientific fields use Word documents as the principle medium for authors?

    Thanks.

    • Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:4, Informative)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @09:20AM (#6406673)
      It's becoming more common where I study (Chemical Engineering, Imperial College, London). Unix machines are being phased out on the desktop (still got the fifty-node linux cluster though), and more clueless Windows users are coming in, so Word usage is becoming more common.

      I know of someone who wrote their entire PhD thesis as one Word document, only to have Word do its "move every diagram to the beginning of the document" thing. He didn't get much sympathy from the Latex users around him!

    • Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pmz ( 462998 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @10:30AM (#6407085) Homepage
      I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter.

      In some supposedly intellectual/academic circles the people are really short sighted and/or downright stupid. The worst thing I've heard proposed recently is changing the format of a very complex ISO document, for the sole purpose of shoehorning the damn thing into the less capable yet popular like a cheap hooker Microsoft Word.

      This is taking an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD document and encoding it into one of the MOST PROPIETARY and LEAST FLEXIBLE formats known to man! Just because the people working with the document cry when their little mouse doesn't click right! Truly sad.
    • I come from the physical sciences (specifically, physics and astronomy) and academia, and I know of no one in the field who uses Word. Or Windows, for that matter.

      I know I already replied to you, but I just remembered that, back in college, an engineering conference required MS Word-format submissions. This was back in the late 90's.

      The ultimate engineering workstation for the thinking-disadvantaged: Windows NT/2K/XP (proprietary lock-in), Pro/E for Windows (more proprietary lock-in, though harder to a
    • In Biotech/Pharma and the academic Biology worlds, I would say, based on a bunch of years working in them, that it is 100% Microsoft word.

      With the plug ins for Endnote/Citation manager it is just way too easy.

      Most Biology Journals accept Word as a submission format.
      • I'm a biologist, and I think I am the only one at my department that uses LaTeX.

        Still, for collaborations I would *ugh* use Word, because I simply can't demand that others read my cludgy neophyte LaTeX code.

        LaTeX with BibTeX and natbib.sty is a great replacement for EndNote and other expensive programs.

    • I know it is hard to believe that scientific/engineering communities still MS Word, but it is still required and oftentimes the only way to submit documents to journals. For example, I am PhD student in mechanical engineering working in the area of tribology and MS Word is the only way to submit a doc to ASME Journal of Tribology. It is truely amazing to me that the journal still operates this way. As an aside the review process for this journal is one of the longest I have ever seen approximately 5 mont
      • tribology

        Have you figured out exactly why that quadrotriticale stuff affects them so much? (Yes, my sense of humor is that pathetic)

        As an aside the review process for this journal is one of the longest I have ever seen approximately 5 months. Compared to the Journal of Physics D which encourages the use of Latex which was reviewed and published in 3 months.

        It takes them an extra two months to figure out how to get the Word format into a presentable form, whereas the LaTeX guys just do a dvips...
    • Biology (Molecular, Computational etc.) - site licensing through subcontractors to MS, plus no time to look into alternatives (even free). We are moving to PDF in some cases. I'm trying to get my lab to migrate to OpenOffice.
    • Biology for one. Biologists don't "do" computers, for the most part.
  • http://www.pdf995.com/

    I tried it, quite neat..
  • You really should take a look at the free QuickTopic service called Quick Doc Review [quicktopic.com]

    I also use their free bulletin boards product (check out the "discuss" links at boingboing.net to see in action) and am very pleased with their stuff. Dead simple and quite powerful.

  • LaTeX plus CVS works well here (Score:3, Informative)

    by martinde ( 137088 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:34AM (#6406487) Homepage
    Often when several of my colleagues and I are working on a paper together, we will use LaTeX + CVS. It works very well, the merging and conflict resolution work well with latex. A couple of important things to make it smoother:
    1) Make sure everyone has their editors set to the same word wrap. This is very very very important so you don't get artificial conflicts.
    2) You can split your tex across multiple files if you want to make the chances of conflicts less likely.
    3) If you want good PDF output in the long run, read about pdflatex and make sure you write tex that it can deal with. Pdflatex generates pdf that is searchable, hyperlinked, etc, unlike dvipdf. It is far superior to dvipdf in every way, and worth the trouble of learning about.

    If you use latex anyways, this is a great way to collaborate. If you're working with people who would rather use Word, well, then this isn't too helpful ;-)

    One last alternative is to write text files, control them with CVS, and then when the writing is done, pull them into Word for formatting. I have worked with people this way too. It's a pain with respect to figures and all of that, but it's a good way to ensure consistent styles, reference and footnote numbering, etc.

  • MVC, Lyx and CVS control (Score:3, Informative)

    by fingal ( 49160 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:43AM (#6406518) Homepage
    couple of points to bear in mind:-
    • CVS or similar change control is your friend. This is a no-brainer for anything that is expected to scale up to any decent number of changes / forks / merges. What is less obvious is that tracking the changes will only really work on an ASCII file format (ever tried to merge two versions of a binary file?). This basically implies that if you are to use something like Word, then you will have to save all your files as RTF before performing your version control, however, the internal format of the RTF files output from Word is most definately non-obvious.
    • formatting of collaboratively authored documents can be a pain unless you are planning to have a final "formatting sweep" once the document has been validated from a content viewpoint. This will be made much more painless if you have some kind of MVC style seperation of content and presentation, and some kind of process in the tool / language used to prepare the work to enforce this seperation. There is a very big difference between a verbal agreement between authors as to how to behave and an enforced layout presentation layer. LaTEX is your friend...
    • LyX [lyx.org] has had CVS integration for years. It also now has beta-functionality in CVS for a visual track-changes of the history of the LaTEX document. To quote from here [lyx.org] (screenshot [lyx.org]):-
      ...One feature that won't make it in 1.3.0 but is essentially complete is "change tracking", a result of work sponsored by Credativ GmbH. Using a new DVI-based package, LyX will automatically track any changes you make to a document, marking deleted text in red with strikeout, and added text in blue. Every change also is marked in the margin with a blue changebar, in both LyX itself, and in the DVI/PostScript output. This is an extremely important feature for people working in collaborative environments, as somebody receiving one of these tracked documents can work through it using LyX's "Merge changes" feature, accepting or rejecting each change individually. If you've ever used Microsoft Word's revision tracking feature, it's very similar to that...

  • I have some similar needs plus several more and I am looking at Groove [groove.net]. It seems to do almost everything I need but it is a bit of a resource hog and there is apparently no reminder feature (a popup window to say "You have a meeting in five minutes", for example). Has anyone here got any experience with it?

    Also, has anyone tried the Groove-compatible project management tool from TeamDirection [teamdirection.com]?.

    • As a company, that is. At first they were all chummy with the small shop/home user community, encouraging add-on development for Groove and spouting its open, P2P, XML-based architecture in every tech rag Ray Ozzie could get an article into. Once they started receiving "corporate" attention (esp. Microsoft), things changed, and they lost interest in the small guys. The free edition has been steadily losing features, while at the same time gaining heft. No thanks!
  • I have been looking into exactly this idea. My personal desire was to have something on the web so I can access it from whereever.

    A great one is oddmuse [oddmuse.org]. It is a single perl script you put in a directory and it sets everything up. It is a wiki, but also has a journal idea. You can put text, latex and images. Quite nice and very simple to "install".

    A couple others along that idea... check out Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. They have software there, more difficult to install, but a very nice look to it. MySQL based. Y

  • I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over. Have you looked at Plone [plone.org]. Pretty powerful & easy to setup & use & yeah, under a gpl compatible license. Using CMFOO [zope.org], an addon, you can write in open office & once you save the document it will show up on the website. Pretty cool.
  • distribute PDFs or host HTML files

    If you can post it in PDF, please post an HTML copy as well. It is frustrating to come across content which is only available in PDF format.
    • Exactly why is this frustrating? Seriously, I've looked at a html version of my thesis and it sucks bigtime. Or are you talking short stupid pdfs that have no real purpose being a pdf in the first place?

  • Wrong question... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by biodork ( 25036 )
    You really need to ask,
    "Are there any free...etc... that I can use and yet still allow everyone else to keep using word?" as you - 1 person, will not be able to make everyone else change. I will give you an almost iron clad guarentee that the first time you give them the 'different' thing, or that requires they learn something new, that they won't do it or they will ask for word. They will wonder, and I think quite rightly, "Why are you fixing something that we don't think is broken".

    By this I mean, they h
  • Lyx (www.lyx.org) currently does not have this feature, but there have been enough discussions about it that there's a good chance it will be available soon. And in every other aspect of document creation, lyx is just absolutely fantastic. Since the underlying typesetting engine is latex, the quality is perfect, and technical journal submissions are a breeze. Yet you have a beautiful interface to work with (use the 1.3.2 qt build), bibliography management (along with pybliographic), instant math editing/
  • See this:

    David G. Durand, Palimpsest: A Data Model for Revision Control [bu.edu].

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