Collaborative Document Editing? 12
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 (Score:1)
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.. (Score:1)
Re:Been thinking about this too.. (Score:1)
Adam
Feeling blonde
Swiki for Collabrative editing (Score:1)
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 (Score:1)
Re:cvs and LaTeX (Score:1)
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 (Score:1)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
cvs and LaTeX (Score:2)
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.