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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
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.
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
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.
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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.
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
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!
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
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
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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