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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
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.
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
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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!