5 ms·

Most existing tools are written by coders for coders; they have diff engines and UIs built for plain-text source code, not human-readable rich text. Word's "tr

Most existing tools are written by coders for coders; they have diff engines and UIs built for plain-text source code, not human-readable rich text. Word's "track changes" feature is good enough that an MVP for such a VCS product would need to have a very good UI. (Source: talking about version control with a lawyer in the family.)

CivBase 7y ago
I use MS Office regularly and I would describe its interface as adequate for general use and infuriating for reading/writing formal documents. If that's the competition, I can't imagine it would be that expensive to develop an alternative (at least, not compared to what the US government current spends). Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Why are LaTeX, Markdown, or HTML not sufficient formats? What makes plaintext not "human-readable"? I don't think anyone has trouble reading/writing their Facebook and Twitter posts in plaintext. Why can't our government afford to develop a lawmaker-specific format and an editor (or plugin for an existing editor) to make it easy for lawmakers to work with? Why can't our government afford to fund the creation of a VCS solution with a lawmaker-friendly interface and a public server to host the repository on? Why can't all of our legal documents at least be hosted on a public server in their current state? I'm guessing the answer to all of these is "because the public doesn't care enough, so it doesn't help anyone get re-elected and, therefore, there is no available funding". I have a hard enough time getting engineers to understand the value of good VCS, much less an average US citizen.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Because lawyers can afford it, and don't really feel like expending effort evaluating software alternatives instead of just doing their work. And because of legacy/network effects. And because no one has pitched an alternative right for that audience.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    > Because lawyers can afford it Lawyers can afford free software too.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      There's a reason that there is an “and” followed by a bunch of other things after the bit you quoted.
      - CivBase 7y ago
        I have nothing to say about those points. I don't know enough to support or reject them.
    - smcl 7y ago
      It's clear what was meant was "cost is no object, so it's not an issue" - law firms probably pay more per-employee for things like travel expenses or coffee each year than for MS Office licenses. I have seen that MS Office suite has become a hammer used to drive many non-nails in various businesses, and would like to see people using more open standards. But I totally understand that for many use cases it's good enough and that people consider the cost to be not particularly significant
      - ska 7y ago
        edit: misplaced reply, moved to parent (too late to delete)
        smcl 7y ago
        Ehhh ok? That’s kinda what I said
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - 7y ago
- flukus 7y ago
  Plain text wouldn't allow for annotations, TOC, references, etc. These get ignored more often than not but they're still requirements and some do use them properly. Something like latex would be better, but apparently it's too much to expect these highly educated lawyers to learn some basic markup. I'd bet a tool like lyx (https://www.lyx.org/Screenshots https://www.lyx.org/Screenshots) would go along way to being a better solution. It's a great document writer (as opposed to a word processor) and apparently has some VCS support (although I haven't tried this) and diff viewing and is a lot more reliable for annotations and all that stuff than word. I've done some legal automation work before, it would have been so much easier (and get better results) to have a plaintext format we could manipulate with shell scripts than working with docx and word.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    - But doesn't plain text suck for difs? + But doesn't plain text suck for diffs? - Especially when you have a really long, multi-line - paragraph that has bmore than one change? And if we - relied on word wrap, then the scope of change would - be the paragraph and all hope is lost. At least - this way we might eventually regain some + Especially when you have an exceptionally long, + multi-line paragraph that has more than one change? + But if we relied on word wrap, then the scope of + change would be the paragraph and all hope is lost. + At least this way we might eventually regain some equivalency by chance and it's clear that nothing after that point has changed. Git is great, but it's designed for code. Legal documents are probably structured more like code than any other prose with clear identified chunks and frequently breaking out into lists, but it's not the same thing. (For clarity, I think probably a sentence-by-sentence diff would work well. But then it's not plain text; you're relying on some processor to collect sentences into paragraphs.)
    - ultraism 7y ago
      Don't use plaintext, use LaTeX. Since paragraphs are separated by an empty line, you can have each sentence on a separate in a paragraph on a separate line and have it still formatted as a paragraph in the final document. This allows for better diffs. Here is an example: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/specification/dartLangSpec.tex#L355 https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/specificat...
- ska 7y ago
  > Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Because the cost of the software is trivial compared to the cost of incompatibility or friction in communication.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    Not for the citizens who just want to read the laws they're expected to follow.
    - ska 7y ago
      Whose final form is probably PDF anyway. Even if it were .docx, there are lots of free softwares that can read or translate those. So your real problem here is with the access to said laws, which is not a software problem.
angled 7y ago
SpringCM does just that. https://www.springcm.com/products/contract-management/negotiations-redlining https://www.springcm.com/products/contract-management/negoti...

CivBase 7y ago

I use MS Office regularly and I would describe its interface as adequate for general use and infuriating for reading/writing formal documents. If that's the competition, I can't imagine it would be that expensive to develop an alternative (at least, not compared to what the US government current spends). Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Why are LaTeX, Markdown, or HTML not sufficient formats? What makes plaintext not "human-readable"? I don't think anyone has trouble reading/writing their Facebook and Twitter posts in plaintext. Why can't our government afford to develop a lawmaker-specific format and an editor (or plugin for an existing editor) to make it easy for lawmakers to work with? Why can't our government afford to fund the creation of a VCS solution with a lawmaker-friendly interface and a public server to host the repository on? Why can't all of our legal documents at least be hosted on a public server in their current state? I'm guessing the answer to all of these is "because the public doesn't care enough, so it doesn't help anyone get re-elected and, therefore, there is no available funding". I have a hard enough time getting engineers to understand the value of good VCS, much less an average US citizen.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Because lawyers can afford it, and don't really feel like expending effort evaluating software alternatives instead of just doing their work. And because of legacy/network effects. And because no one has pitched an alternative right for that audience.
- CivBase 7y ago
  > Because lawyers can afford it Lawyers can afford free software too.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    There's a reason that there is an “and” followed by a bunch of other things after the bit you quoted.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      I have nothing to say about those points. I don't know enough to support or reject them.
  - smcl 7y ago
    It's clear what was meant was "cost is no object, so it's not an issue" - law firms probably pay more per-employee for things like travel expenses or coffee each year than for MS Office licenses. I have seen that MS Office suite has become a hammer used to drive many non-nails in various businesses, and would like to see people using more open standards. But I totally understand that for many use cases it's good enough and that people consider the cost to be not particularly significant
    - ska 7y ago
      edit: misplaced reply, moved to parent (too late to delete)
      - smcl 7y ago
        Ehhh ok? That’s kinda what I said
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - 7y ago
flukus 7y ago
Plain text wouldn't allow for annotations, TOC, references, etc. These get ignored more often than not but they're still requirements and some do use them properly. Something like latex would be better, but apparently it's too much to expect these highly educated lawyers to learn some basic markup. I'd bet a tool like lyx (https://www.lyx.org/Screenshots https://www.lyx.org/Screenshots) would go along way to being a better solution. It's a great document writer (as opposed to a word processor) and apparently has some VCS support (although I haven't tried this) and diff viewing and is a lot more reliable for annotations and all that stuff than word. I've done some legal automation work before, it would have been so much easier (and get better results) to have a plaintext format we could manipulate with shell scripts than working with docx and word.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  - But doesn't plain text suck for difs? + But doesn't plain text suck for diffs? - Especially when you have a really long, multi-line - paragraph that has bmore than one change? And if we - relied on word wrap, then the scope of change would - be the paragraph and all hope is lost. At least - this way we might eventually regain some + Especially when you have an exceptionally long, + multi-line paragraph that has more than one change? + But if we relied on word wrap, then the scope of + change would be the paragraph and all hope is lost. + At least this way we might eventually regain some equivalency by chance and it's clear that nothing after that point has changed. Git is great, but it's designed for code. Legal documents are probably structured more like code than any other prose with clear identified chunks and frequently breaking out into lists, but it's not the same thing. (For clarity, I think probably a sentence-by-sentence diff would work well. But then it's not plain text; you're relying on some processor to collect sentences into paragraphs.)
  - ultraism 7y ago
    Don't use plaintext, use LaTeX. Since paragraphs are separated by an empty line, you can have each sentence on a separate in a paragraph on a separate line and have it still formatted as a paragraph in the final document. This allows for better diffs. Here is an example: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/specification/dartLangSpec.tex#L355 https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/specificat...
ska 7y ago
> Why are legal documents recorded in a format that requires expensive software to access? Because the cost of the software is trivial compared to the cost of incompatibility or friction in communication.
- CivBase 7y ago
  Not for the citizens who just want to read the laws they're expected to follow.
  - ska 7y ago
    Whose final form is probably PDF anyway. Even if it were .docx, there are lots of free softwares that can read or translate those. So your real problem here is with the access to said laws, which is not a software problem.

angled 7y ago

SpringCM does just that. https://www.springcm.com/products/contract-management/negotiations-redlining https://www.springcm.com/products/contract-management/negoti...