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Free Tools for Collaborative Editing?
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?"
OpenOffice.org Writer does have a track changes feature like Word's.
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.
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?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
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.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
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 be removed at will.
(Man, I hope I'm not completely wrong here, it's been some time - it was in Adobe Acrobat 5 - I'm pretty sure) ;
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.
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.
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 interaction. When I joined, the mentality was very different - you actually talked to engineers whose functions were different from yours - wow! Things got done with far fewer iterations.
This was true in high school too. We had a drop-in writing aide when you needed help with an essay for class, college application, whatever. There was just one "catch": you weren't allowed to drop off a paper and expect to get it back with editor's marks. You were required to sit down with the aide and read it aloud with them, reviewing and improving every line. In class, when we did peer reviews, it was the same thing. The result was better essays and better skills.
If you really want to collaborate with others, then do it - the right way.
'Q' is for Dr. Tran
that's it. one-to-one direct communication does not scale to groups of hundreds of people.
Most sections of a collaborative project involve only a few people - my honours thesis was only two (myself and my supervisor) and my Masters thesis will be only three (myself, plus two cosupers). Even if you add in a few consultants, that's still easily less than half a dozen people. I agree that collaboration tools are important, but most large projects are broken down into smaller, bite-size chunks before roles are allocated. Managing large quantities of input is only necessary when bringing it all together, and even then you are only dealing with each of the team leaders.
.docs back and forth over email, particularly when only a few people are involved.
Collab tools are important, they allow us to easily work around other issues, such as location and time zone differences, that face-to-face meetings are not appropriate for. But meeting in person is always more constructive then shifting
Don't knock HTML email. It makes my life easier, since I
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.
If the files are text files, you could probably do worse than RCS -- you know, the Revision Control System?
,v file -- have the person check in his changes and mail it out to everyone else. But that's kind of clunky, really.
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 own branch of revisions (just like with source code), check out someone's version for inspection, etc. This would really only work well if one central person maintains the repository, or it's in a common directory somewhere.
This would be more straightforward with CVS, except that CVS requires either a pserver setup or a shared directory that everyone can access r/w, as well as the CVS client software. With RCS it's a little more work but you can pass the files around as regular files rather than having CVS maintain the repository. I suppose you could even pass around the
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 nice side effect, you have the output with much higher quality than you could ever expect from Microsoft Office (or Open Office for that matter) thanks to Don Knuth. Remember that Microsoft Office, unlike TeX, is not a type setting system, but merely an office grade "word processor." The difference is huge, but frequently overlooked. In short, Word is good for clueless secretaries sending faxes, while TeX is good for professional typesetters and typographers working in the real publishing industry preparing the most important and the most beautiful books for print. You have to always make sure which solution fits your needs better. I hope this will help you. Good luck.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
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.
Here at the Yucca Mountain Project, we are evaluating an Open Source application called eNote . 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, equations, images, graphs, signatures, and other data are recorded on electronic notebook "pages", which can be read and navigated just like in a paper notebook. Instead of writing with a pen and taping in images and graphs, reading and adding to an electronic notebook is done through a computer and can involve input from keyboard, sketchpads, mouse, image files, microphone, and directly from scientific instruments. Electronic notebook software varies in how much it "looks and feels" like a paper notebook, but all the basic functions of a paper notebook are present. In addition, electronic notebooks allow easier input of scientific data and the ability for collaborators in different geographic locations to share the record of ideas, data and events of the joint experiments and research programs.
The sole test of knowledge is experiment. -- R. Feynman
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.
http://www.pdf995.com/
I tried it, quite neat..
The lunatic is in my head
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.
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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.
The only Good System is a Sound System
I have some similar needs plus several more and I am looking at Groove. 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?.
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!
A great one is oddmuse. 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. They have software there, more difficult to install, but a very nice look to it. MySQL based. You can also do Latex (or some subset) of it.
The other one I will mention is Noosphere (which runs the Planetmath site. This I have found a little more difficult to enter stuff into, but it has many nice features.
All of them allow you to grab previous versions of the HTML document and they track who made what changes. Also, you can see my bent is toward more mathematical ones.
For what you say, I would grab the oddmuse and try that. Very easy to install.
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!
Apart from software piracy?
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. Pretty powerful & easy to setup & use & yeah, under a gpl compatible license. Using CMFOO, an addon, you can write in open office & once you save the document it will show up on the website. Pretty cool.
Well, there are 40 physicists here, and no more than 5 of them use anything else. From what I have heard from the Astrophysical Journal, they have their own SGML-based production system, so I'm sure they're quite capable of handling Word documents when necessary. In fact, a quick check of their author guidelines shows that Word and WordPerfect are listed second after LaTeX.
UCP will accept manuscripts prepared with the Microsoft Word or WordPerfect processors; however, authors must note that these applications are not designed for the preparation of highly technical, math-intensive manuscripts. LaTeX is recommended for articles containing substantial math. Due to the limitations of these processors, authors are urged to read the following instructions carefully to avoid publication delays and to reduce conversion errors.
They go on to give very normal production notes, including a recommendation of MathType for those who simply can't use LaTeX for math. I'm guessing that the less computer-savvy older generation probably usually use a grad student or two as co-authors who can handle LaTeX. So while yes, you could say they are discouraging anything but LaTeX, they are also providing production instructions for the vast majority who know a lot about physics, but very little about typesetting.
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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 avoid), and Microsoft Office (yet more proprietary lock-in). I'm suprised how many people are totally satisifed whistling while they work, yet the simply don't look down to see their testicles (if a man) gripped by an iron fist protruding from their computer. I'm not sure what the iron fist would choose for women, but I think my point is clear.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Consider not using them. Immagine if all computer documents were in a standard character representation, so that all editors would work with all documents and tools for examining and merging differences (such as ediff and xdiff) would just work ! It's been done, and the nobel prize is in the works.
It's called ASCII.
TeX or LaTeX produces the best output from ascii. HTML can be passible if you don't mind your papers sucking. But if your people use a html editor such as Netscape Composer, then they are fucked when they go to examine changes, and deservedly so because they strayed from the one true choice of ASCII.
Basically, you (and thousands like you) say "I didn't want to learn LaTeX because that looked like hard leanring. So I learned a graphical piece of crap instead which took more time and got me less but was easier to stomach because their were colors and moving things to make me forget I was learning. Now I am trapped."
Untrap yourself. Use LaTeX and CVS.
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.
Gavin Fischer
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.
Gavin Fischer
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 haven't made the descision to live in a Microsoft free world, and thus they don't see anything wrong with this nice way of making changes. You can try to convert them to your way of thinking, but you have to factor in that most people want to do things the easiest way they can, and for them (already knowing how the MS way works) the track changes way is best.
From my own use.... I love this feature, and use it all the time.
Gavin Fischer
You disagree with what exactly? It is widely acknowledged that equations in Word suck. Show me ten pdfs and I can tell you exactly without hesitation which are word versions.
I'm not sure what the iron fist would choose for women, but I think my point is clear.
There are women in engineering?
I must be working at the wrong place.
May we never see th
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 months. Compared to the Journal of Physics D which encourages the use of Latex which was reviewed and published in 3 months.
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...
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
There are women in engineering?
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?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I think the delay is primarily due to the use of Word in that things can appear differently on different computers or versions. Therefore they force you to submit "hard copies" by snail mail rather than an electronically using pdf.
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.
Where I work, there are 3 women for every man, and all the women look like Sandra Bullock.
:o)
CloneAid?
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.
Are you trying to suggest that I should not recommend a good, meritoriously optimal solution becuse those people are in your opinion too incompetent to follow my advice? How convenient. However terribly sorry to disappoint you I might be, I will never assume that people whom I talk to are so stupid. Never. I am sorry.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Nice try, Mr. Gates!
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
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/preview, etc.
Give it a try. I started using it years ago and never have written a single line of tex by hand since.
See this:
David G. Durand, Palimpsest: A Data Model for Revision Control.
that's a good one! +5:funny! :-)
looks like this time she really kicked your ass and kicked it badly, mr. digitect... a gentle man would at least apologize.