Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Free Tools for Collaborative Editing?

Posted by Cliff on from the one-document-many-authors dept.

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?"

2 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. CVS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. :-)

  2. WordPerfect 5.1 - Believe it or not! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 ...