Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[David Reitter]

How would one track changes in Emacs and mark them up directly in an  
Emacs buffer?

I often collaborate with people on documents and it's useful to see  
what changes they've made.  Many of my collaborators will want to use  
Word, if only for its nice change-tracking feature.

I would need a combination of highlight-changes-mode and a way to save  
and load the change history of a buffer into a file, just like MS Word  
does it (with the new open docx format).

One option would be to use some sort of repository, or to store  
versions of files before and after the changes and use M-x diff.  But  
that doesn't do a good job of tracking in-line changes (in times of  
soft-wrapping, paragraphs are file lines!), and obviously I can't  
force my collaborators to use extra tools.  The added pain of having  
to manage multiple file versions is also considerable, and there's  
limited extra benefit in versioning repositories with, say,  
manuscripts.  You hardly ever want to inspect older history, or go  
back to a previous version.  (Having separate branches might work  
well, but it's hard to get collaborators to commit to this technical  
overhead. And again, even git's merge algorithm is line-based.)

All in all, I'm missing good Emacs support for non-concurrent  
(asynchronous) real-time editing.  Suggestions would be welcome.

- David Reitter

Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[Andreas Politz]

David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com> writes:

> All in all, I'm missing good Emacs support for non-concurrent
> (asynchronous) real-time editing.  Suggestions would be welcome.
>
Assuming such a thing for emacs would exist, how would that help you, if
one of your fellow contributors sends in his latest work in some XML
format ?

-ap

Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[Joost Kremers]

David Reitter wrote:
> I often collaborate with people on documents and it's useful to see  
> what changes they've made.  Many of my collaborators will want to use  
> Word, if only for its nice change-tracking feature.

well, i guess *any* method of tracking changes in emacs won't be compatible with
.doc or .docx files anyway, so isn't it pointless to try and do this in emacs?
or do you think all of your collaborators would be willing to use emacs if only
a decent "track changes" option were available?

> I would need a combination of highlight-changes-mode and a way to save  
> and load the change history of a buffer into a file, just like MS Word  
> does it (with the new open docx format).

highlight-changes-mode uses text properties to track changes. the elisp manual
describes a theoretical method of saving text properties to a file:

(info "elisp (Format Conversion Piecemeal)")

but a quick google search suggests no-one has actually implemented it.

> All in all, I'm missing good Emacs support for non-concurrent  
> (asynchronous) real-time editing.  Suggestions would be welcome.

i guess a good way would be to augment highlight-changes-mode with the necessary
functions to save the text properties it uses to a file and reading them back
in. but that would take some elisp hacking...


-- 
Joost Kremers                                      joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[Andreas Röhler]

David Reitter wrote:
> How would one track changes in Emacs and mark them up directly in an
> Emacs buffer?
>
> I often collaborate with people on documents and it's useful to see
> what changes they've made.  Many of my collaborators will want to use
> Word, if only for its nice change-tracking feature.
>
> I would need a combination of highlight-changes-mode and a way to save
> and load the change history of a buffer into a file, just like MS Word
> does it (with the new open docx format).
>
> One option would be to use some sort of repository, or to store
> versions of files before and after the changes and use M-x diff.  But
> that doesn't do a good job of tracking in-line changes (in times of
> soft-wrapping, paragraphs are file lines!), and obviously I can't
> force my collaborators to use extra tools.  The added pain of having
> to manage multiple file versions is also considerable, and there's
> limited extra benefit in versioning repositories with, say,
> manuscripts.  You hardly ever want to inspect older history, or go
> back to a previous version.  (Having separate branches might work
> well, but it's hard to get collaborators to commit to this technical
> overhead. And again, even git's merge algorithm is line-based.)
>
> All in all, I'm missing good Emacs support for non-concurrent
> (asynchronous) real-time editing.  Suggestions would be welcome.
>
> - David Reitter
>
>
>

What about to translate doc-format into odt, as used by openoffice?
These are xml-files basically AFAIK, which may be set under a VC-system
like bazaar, RCS, whatever - and edited with emacs xml-mode.

Andreas

Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[David Reitter]

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On Sep 10, 2009, at 9:21 AM, Andreas Röhler wrote:
> What about to translate doc-format into odt, as used by openoffice?
> These are xml-files basically AFAIK, which may be set under a VC- 
> system
> like bazaar, RCS, whatever - and edited with emacs xml-mode.

Right, but I'm unsure how the change tracking would work that way.  In  
fact I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do the right thing...

(Also, editing the Word document as raw Docx XML (Docx is XML already)  
would sort of defeat the purpose of using Emacs.)

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Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[David (World) Reitter]

On Sep 9, 3:38 pm, Joost Kremers <joostkrem...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> > I would need a combination of highlight-changes-mode and a way to save  
> > and load the change history of a buffer into a file, just like MS Word  
> > does it (with the new open docx format).
>
> highlight-changes-mode uses text properties to track changes. the elisp manual
> describes a theoretical method of saving text properties to a file:

Right, but even then you'd only save the properties and not the
semantics (unless track-changes uses only properties, which it may
well do).

Upon loading changes in, you should be able to accept / reject each
change.
And of course I'd like to see who made the change.

Basically, MS Word does a good job.  It also merges changes, something
even modern version control systems can't do well enough (since they
are line-oriented).

I think this is a huge omission on the part of GNU Emacs...