Free Tools for Collaborative Editing? 96
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?"
OOo has that feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
CVS? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:CVS? (Score:1, Interesting)
with Hydra (collaborative editor) you can "chat" by using the document you're all editing but it's not quite the same. And hydra doesn't have any CVS integration (though it works with project builder which does).
really, it's not enough to just have the pieces, you need a well-designed whole. there are a lot of possibilities for real-time
Re:CVS? (Score:2)
More importantly, you want to see the document with revisions so that
Re:binary documents (Score:3, Informative)
To add to that, LaTeX does have changebar support:
LaTeX Changebars [ctan.org]
It even comes with a script to diff two LaTeX documents and add the changebars for you. ASCII wins again!
Best tool for the job (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:2)
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:2)
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:3, Insightful)
No, Microsoft hasn't been "convicted" of anything. The antitrust case was a civil one.
"Microsoft convicted of software piracy" (Score:1)
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:2)
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.
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:2)
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:3, Interesting)
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 .
Do you find Word quirky? (Score:2)
Re:Best tool for the job - MAYBE... (Score:1)
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.
Re:Best tool for the job - MAYBE... (Score:1)
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:2)
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!
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:1)
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
Re:Best tool for the job (Score:1)
WordPerfect 5.1 - Believe it or not! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:WordPerfect 5.1 - Believe it or not! (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft Office 2003 (Score:2)
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.
Re:Microsoft Office 2003 (Score:2)
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.
Re:Microsoft Office 2003 (Score:1)
try Hydra for realtime internet collaboration (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:try Hydra for realtime internet collaboration (Score:2)
Hydra is fantastic -- check it out [globalse.org].
Isn't collaboration part of PDF (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Isn't collaboration part of PDF (Score:1)
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.
Re:Isn't collaboration part of PDF (Score:2)
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
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)
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.
Re:A little off the wall.. (Score:1)
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)
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.
how do you get collaboration with isolation? (Score:2, Insightful)
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-
It DOES scale - To a point. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:how do you get collaboration with isolation? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:how do you get collaboration with isolation? (Score:2)
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)
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)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My own experience on this very field (Score:2)
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
Re:My own experience on this very field (Score:1)
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.
Nice try! (Score:1)
Nice try, Mr. Gates!
Re:My own experience on this very field (Score:2)
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
How convenient. (Score:1)
Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have. (This is probably the most stupid question I have ever answered.)
Please forgive me that I (quite foolishly, as you imply) assumed that those are in fact intelligent and literate people.
Re:How convenient. (Score:2)
<sigh> Trollish, but I'll bite...
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.
eNote - An Electronic Scientific Notebook (Score:2, Interesting)
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,
Re:eNote - An Electronic Scientific Notebook (Score:2)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:2)
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
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:2)
There are women in engineering?
I must be working at the wrong place.
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:2)
I must be working at the wrong place.
Yup. Where I work, there are 3 women for every man, and all the women look like Sandra Bullock.
What lame company did you get stuck with?
All of Biology... (Score:1)
With the plug ins for Endnote/Citation manager it is just way too easy.
Most Biology Journals accept Word as a submission format.
Re:All of Biology... (Score:2)
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.
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:1)
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:2)
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...
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:1)
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:1)
Re:OT: Just out of curiosity, what field uses Word (Score:2)
You should try this out.. (Score:1)
I tried it, quite neat..
Re: (Score:2)
QuickTopic (Score:1)
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)
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)
Groove? (Score:2)
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]?.
Groove suck! (Score:2)
A few more options (Score:1)
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
plone + openoffice (Score:2)
HTML copy (Score:2)
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.
Re:HTML copy (Score:1)
Wrong question... (Score:2, Insightful)
"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 will probably get this in the future (Score:2)
Re:Lyx will probably get this in the future (Score:1)
Palimpsest (Score:1)
David G. Durand, Palimpsest: A Data Model for Revision Control [bu.edu].