3 ms·

One word of caution: Plain text (or Markdown et al.) are great if you are a one-man operation or your collaborators share your love of plain text. However, if a

by copperx 12y ago

One word of caution: Plain text (or Markdown et al.) are great if you are a one-man operation or your collaborators share your love of plain text. However, if any of your collaborators, proofreaders, or editors use Word to mark up changes, it is incredibly painful to manually go through through the marked-up Word document, and go back and manually backport every change. As much as I love plain text and LaTeX and its wonderful typesetting (especially with the Microtype package, XeLaTeX, and pro fonts), I stick to Word because it is the status quo in the publishing toolchain: doing otherwise is swimming upstream. I would welcome to hear about solutions to this conundrum.

meonkeys 12y ago
I agree, while wincing and trying to deny same. What if you kept the source in plain text, then did reviewing in a WYSIWYG program with any collaborators, proofreaders, and editors that require a WYSIWYG program? After consensus is reached, convert WYSIWYG versions back to plain text, then use a tool to diff+merge changes back into your source. Using source control, you could track coarse or fine changes as desired. I use Pandoc, Vimdiff, and Git in this manner. Vim automates much of the "back porting" pain (never mind the pain of actually learning Vim, which I've already endured).
kijin 12y ago
If all your documents were in a GitHub repository, you could teach people to comment on specific lines, view diffs, etc. However, that's probably still too much for the majority of academic writers and editors, and you can't blame them because they're too busy specializing in other fields.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  The homotopy type theory book was managed over github : https://github.com/HoTT/book/commit/cb5b01618ac3cf2774430b503d39e4763c8a4c1e https://github.com/HoTT/book/commit/cb5b01618ac3cf2774430b50...
- collyw 12y ago
  Git seems too much for many programmers unless it is forced upon them, I don't see it gaining traction outside of its intended field. Maybe there is a market for a simple to use equivalent.

by copperx 12y ago

meonkeys 12y ago

I agree, while wincing and trying to deny same. What if you kept the source in plain text, then did reviewing in a WYSIWYG program with any collaborators, proofreaders, and editors that require a WYSIWYG program? After consensus is reached, convert WYSIWYG versions back to plain text, then use a tool to diff+merge changes back into your source. Using source control, you could track coarse or fine changes as desired. I use Pandoc, Vimdiff, and Git in this manner. Vim automates much of the "back porting" pain (never mind the pain of actually learning Vim, which I've already endured).

kijin 12y ago

If all your documents were in a GitHub repository, you could teach people to comment on specific lines, view diffs, etc. However, that's probably still too much for the majority of academic writers and editors, and you can't blame them because they're too busy specializing in other fields.

agumonkey 12y ago
The homotopy type theory book was managed over github : https://github.com/HoTT/book/commit/cb5b01618ac3cf2774430b503d39e4763c8a4c1e https://github.com/HoTT/book/commit/cb5b01618ac3cf2774430b50...
collyw 12y ago
Git seems too much for many programmers unless it is forced upon them, I don't see it gaining traction outside of its intended field. Maybe there is a market for a simple to use equivalent.