Advice needed: collaborative writing tools

colak · 2014-01-05 12:00:36

Can anyone suggest a tool geared towards collaborative writing but also has version tracking of the text for mac?

GugUser · 2014-01-05 12:37:15

SubEthaEdit? I don’t know how it is with the version tracking.

colak · 2014-01-05 12:44:17

GugUser wrote #277801:

SubEthaEdit? I don’t know how it is with the version tracking.

Hi and thanks… Unfortunately that looks more like a coding tool. What I am looking for is a tool with which I can write an actual academic text including italics, bold, footnotes, paragraph indents, etc.

ax · 2014-01-05 12:56:31

colak wrote #277802:

What I am looking for is a tool with which I can write an actual academic text including italics, bold, footnotes, paragraph indents, etc.

For academic writing, you could try writeLaTeX.

colak · 2014-01-05 13:02:18

ax wrote #277804:

For academic writing, you could try writeLaTeX.

That seems to be exactly what I need but it also gave me an idea where it says “Quick save to Dropbox”. Thanks so much for this. I can discuss with my collaborator on the methodology we could follow for the text now.

gaekwad · 2014-01-05 13:16:16

If I’m not too late: Editorially

colak · 2014-01-05 13:30:19

gaekwad wrote #277806:

If I’m not too late: Editorially

No you are not too late yet. I wrote the email but I’m sleeping on it till tomorrow:)

There is one phrase there which I’m not sure: “Share and discuss.” Does that mean that all you do there is by default visible to others? Can that be limited to only share and collaborate with just one person?

gaekwad · 2014-01-05 13:47:24

colak wrote #277807:

There is one phrase there which I’m not sure: “Share and discuss.” Does that mean that all you do there is by default visible to others?

Frankly, I don’t know. I’ve used it with two-person collab and it’s secure in that respect, but I haven’t tested it with multiple levels of rights and access (i.e., share with big editor person but not with lowly contributor).

els · 2014-01-05 20:24:50

Google Docs or Google sites?

jstubbs · 2014-01-06 00:00:02

Here’s one I came across yesterday: Typewrite. Writer Pro also, but seems not to be collaborative.

Destry · 2014-02-08 13:14:47

Colak,

These three — Editorially, Draft, and Penflip — are the latest contenders on the market these days for collaborative writing. I use all three to one degree or another. These are not text/code editors like TextMate, SubEthaEdit, etc, etc. Another great system is GatherContent, but that’s more for planning entire website projects (and at cost). It would be a DREAM if Textpattern ever allowed integration with tools like these, but, hey, we can at least dream.

None of these tools use Textile. All of them use Markdown. But that’s fine with me, because most of my collaborators don’t use Textpattern. (I really, really, really hope we’re going to get that Markdown filter in Txp 4.6. It’s absolutely crazy to stick with only what the rest of the world isn’t using.)

Of those initial three, all the “cool kids” seem to be favoring Editorially, which has a pretty popular team of people behind it (Mandy Brown, Jason Santa Maria, etc). The UI on it is a little tighter too, likely because of the team effort behind it. Draft and Penflip are solo developer projects, and the UIs reflect that a bit. But they are very interesting tools.

Editorially and Draft are similar in concept and features: collaborate on a document by document basis, comment on the work as you go, save to some location in the cloud. But within that there are some differences. For example Draft allows you to save to Drive in addition to Dropbox. Draft has full revision history (a little clunky last I tried it). For both of these, you docs are private to who you share them with by email invition.

Penflip stands out from the other two by being an actual writing layer over Github, thus is works with subversion model. Rather than collaborating on the same doc, each person works on their own version and then the owner chooses what to merge. Also, Penflip allows working offline when there’s no web connection, via the Githup client. I’ve not been able to get this working, though, and the developer is terrible about replying to help requests. Still, I think there’s a lot of promise with Penflip.

In the end, if you’re looking for one to just get going quickly. I’d say Editorially. But check ‘em all out when you have the time.

colak · 2014-02-08 16:51:15

Hi Destry, Thanks for keeping us (me) updated on this.

We finally decided to work using apple pages with tracking switched on and saved on a shared folder in dropbox which keeps previous versions of the document. Reading through the tracked changes every time is not ideal but it is very obvious as to what has changed, by whom and when whereas dropbox allows us to scrub whole days work so as to revert to a version when the text made more sense. I guess that the advantage was that we did not have to learn any new software (as easy as text editors are).

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#1 2014-01-05 12:00:36