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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?
These are low-end systems, but they are in fairly wide use.
A related subject is collaborative annotation. this paper has a good review of tools, and CritLink 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
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.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Try the Zope 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 is a collaborative issues tracker. And Squishdot 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.
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.