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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.
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
Increasingly the cost of Word and the scattered versions is making it less and less of a productive tool.
When 20% your team can't afford to upgrade to Word XP, 30% is still on Word 97, 10% is on Word for Mac, and 5% have their notmal.dot template taken over by a Windows virus - it's easier to tell everybody to workload OpenOffice 1.1 and call it a day.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.