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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?"
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.
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
Grammatica is by FAR the best grammer checker ever written. The reason being that the guys that wrote it weren't simply programmers, many of them were also Phd's in English. As far as pdf's go the specification is free and open just check Adobe's site
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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.
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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.
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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!
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 issues in MS Word. Also, I found WordPerfect 5.2 and 6.1 for Windows quite stable, it was 6.0 that was as buggy as a bayou in July (there was never a WordPerfect 1.0 for Windows; the first version for Windows was WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows).
To add to that, LaTeX does have changebar support:
LaTeX Changebars
It even comes with a script to diff two LaTeX documents and add the changebars for you. ASCII wins again!
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