Collaborative Document Editing?

print-spool asks: "I know the feature has existed in certain products for some time, but is there a Free Software alternative for the collaborative editing of a document out there? This seems to me like a gap in the wide range of existing software, and would be particularly helpful for the improvement of HOWTOs, FAQs etc. As well as Open Books and the like. So do any of you know of such a utility, or if you are a developer do you know if such a system would be feasible to implement? " As long as the document is text (or even TeX) then CVS would work well enough. However, if the document is of some binary form then that may not be a good choice. Any other ideas?

Re:Conglomerate

[Mike Miller]

To compile it on a RH6-type Linux box I had to make a minor change to the makefile to find libflux headers:

CFLAGS = -I/myhome/conge-0.1.1/src/libflux-0.2.8/include -g `gtk-config --cflags`

It's really short on features and configurability so far, but it looks really nice. I'm still trying to figure out if I can use XML to solve some of my outstanding problems and something along these lines is a step in the right direction :-)

- Mike

Been thinking about this too..

[AdamJ]

I've done some thinking and note-taking about this concept too. It actually started out because I wanted to allow people to comment on articles posted to a website I run in a sort of "BugZilla" way, allowing the author of the document to sift through them based on what the comment was classified as (Typo-grammar-spelling/content/structure/etc), "Close" comments as necessary, and generally provide a structured approach towards commentary on documents. Anyone who's been on a mailing list where documents are edited knows how time consuming it can be to dig through multiple comments on an article and integrate them into the article. From this concept, it became obvious to me that it would be beneficial for the authors to be able to edit documents right from the web, so they don't need to be uploaded via FTP or sent to another human, then uploaded. I haven't really accounted for a document having multiple authors, but that shouldn't be a problem. Different permission levels would allow some people to only comment on the article, while authors could comment, edit the articles they're listed as author for, and edit/remove comments for those articles. I've started working towards a partial implementation of this on the website in question, but I'm hampered by lack of time at the moment, so there's nothing to show for it yet. FWIW, I'm mostly an amatuer at this kind of stuff - this would be my first big web based coding project. The files I'm dealing with are plain HTML files with minimal formatting, and I'm planning on using PHP and mySQL, with the entire (Admin and public) interface being web-based. It would, of course, be Open Source :-) Adam

Re:Been thinking about this too..

[AdamJ]

It would also default to "Post as Plain Text".. *sigh*

Adam
Feeling blonde

Swiki for Collabrative editing

[DaitanGio]

You can try Swiki (here [swiki.net]) for a collaborative Web server. It is very very easy to use and it is free!! You can find implementations in Perl, Smalltalk and Java.
It is used in the portland pattern repository [c2.com] too. You can write web pages, without knowing a lot of html, do search on the archive and so on...
Enjoy!!

Re:cvs and LaTeX

[zero-one]

Why would anyone want to convert LaTeX to Word (a question, not a flame)? Word may have a nice UI but very few programs can produce output that look anywhere as nice as TeX.

Re:cvs and LaTeX

[RGRistroph]

I totally agree.

But sometimes they want a final version of the document in Word to deliver to people who have no idea how to deal with anything else.

It's not something that I can do anything about.

Conglomerate

[paulywog]

I just discovered Conglomerate on freshmeat while searching for something else. I haven't tried out the tool yet, but it creates XML, is GUI, and claims to provide change tracking and version merging facilities. We'll see...

The URL: http://www.conglomerate.org [conglomerate.org]

Anyone else used this tool yet?

** A side question: Does anyone's company use (or has anyone seen) an in-house manual of style for vague areas of technical documentation (a Chicago Manual of Style for technology). That includes, for instance, context sensitive definitions of data warehouse, ecommerce, business intelligence, etc. All of those great business-savvy catch phrases and buzz words.

Anyone have any suggested references or starting points? **

A few ideas

[barries]

Check out Wiki-Wiki [c2.com] and some related works for a simple "text whiteboard" approach. Also, there's CVSWebEdit [mrjc.com].

These are low-end systems, but they are in fairly wide use.

A related subject is collaborative annotation. this paper [elpub.org] has a good review of tools, and CritLink [crit.org] is interesting.

I really want to work on this as part of an Open Source developer groupware app I'm working on, but the tuit supply is remarkably scarce at the moment...

- Barrie

CVS & text documents

[Stephen]

One problem I have with CVS with text documents is that even when one only changes one tiny thing, often the whole paragraph gets reformatted. Then when you look at a "cvs diff", it's difficult to spot the real change.

With formats like HTML and TeX where the position of newlines within a paragraph isn't significant, one can avoid this, but only by being very disciplined about not reformatting a paragraph with short lines. And all the writers have to do this. Myself, my fingers keep itching to press M-q.

With text/plain, one presumably has to do the same, and then format the paragraphs only when ready for document release, and as a separate cvs commit.

Up on the Zope Box

[rumba]

Try the Zope [zope.org] web app server. Zope turns all docs/folders into objects, assigning permissions is at its core. Just give users who log in permissions over a certain level of the document hierarchy and they're collaborating. A little knowledge of XML or Python and you can wing it with finesse. ITrack [zope.org] is a collaborative issues tracker. And Squishdot [zope.org] is the discussion widget with the look and feel of your favorite flamefest. The Zope community is rapidly extending and support is getting better with improved documentation and user's groups.

cvs and LaTeX

[RGRistroph]

I will ignore the side issue of whether collaborative document development without extensive communication through a side channel (telephone, email, face-to-face converstations) is a good idea in the first place.

I have worked on several different projects in which we did or attempted to do collaborative document editing. Usually it starts out with one person maintaining an official web site version and merging in everyone's changes, and then it devolves into a token-ring-like situation with emailed attachments being mailed around to everyone clogging mail systems and confusing the issue who has the official version.

Just use LaTeX and cvs. The people who do word won't like it, but tell them tough. They get used to it surprisingly quickly, especially if you tell them that no-one should be worrying about margin widths or other formatting issues until it is to the point of one person editing it.

At that point you can convert it to Word. Converting LaTeX to word goes surprising fast and easy.