Someone please fix text-editing software • Hacker News Board

Re: Someone please fix text-editing software

#11

Post by Pxtl » Thu, May 15, 2014, 5:52 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #10

Pxtl wrote: post #4

Outside of the professional writing industry, Track Changes is a blessing. Funny how he complains about Track Changes. When I show new users the Track Changes functionality in word they get giddy with excitement. It's not perfect, but it's a hundred times better than what I usually expect from a stakeholder "hey, I sent back your Word document with some changes. What? No I don't remember what page I made them on."

> hey, I sent back your Word document with some changes. What? No I don't remember what page I made them on." Compare and merge even let you pretend everyone you know neatly tracks their changes, whether you've told them about it yet or not. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306484

... wait, you can do that? Awesome!

Re: Someone please fix text-editing software

#12

Post by Pxtl » Thu, May 15, 2014, 5:53 PM UTC

pmichaud wrote: post #7

Seems like a shoe in for an editor with git as a backend, and cute, inline diff visualization. Seems not terribly difficult to get an MVP out?

I've run into this problem before, in a different field:

Everybody uses Word. Unless you can get your "inline diff visualization" to support Word documents, it's not going to work.

Re: Someone please fix text-editing software

#13

Post by laurenbee » Thu, May 15, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #9

The article compares "clean" insertions and deletions on paper with commentary "piled up in the margins" from tracked changes. Yes, marginalia is more foreboding than a simple strikethrough, but that's not a digital vs. hard copy issue. Comparing apples to apples, the deletions and insertions in track are just as visually simple as on paper. The article's suggestion of more in-lining, if applied to comments on conten…

As a technical writer, I completely agree with you.

I also wonder if the author knows that you can modify the way track changes shows different types of changes (it sounds like she has everything in balloons, which could indeed be a nightmare with enough changes).

Something like GitHub for documents could potentially solve the collaboration issues, but I couldn't see myself replacing Word anytime soon. Word's formatting capabilities are unparalleled, track changes works well enough for my purposes (and better than anything else I've tried), and the cost and time spent implementing a new solution and training all of my coworkers would be too great.

Re: Someone please fix text-editing software

#14

Post by pmichaud » Thu, May 15, 2014, 6:55 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #12

pmichaud wrote: post #7

Seems like a shoe in for an editor with git as a backend, and cute, inline diff visualization. Seems not terribly difficult to get an MVP out?

I've run into this problem before, in a different field: Everybody uses Word. Unless you can get your "inline diff visualization" to support Word documents, it's not going to work.

That would probably makes things more difficult to MVP, but it seems doable to create a plugin for Word that's kind of pretty, and handles edits, editors, drafts, etc through git (maybe even distributed, although local would work fine).

Re: Someone please fix text-editing software

#15

Post by nickzarzycki » Thu, May 15, 2014, 7:42 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #9

The article compares "clean" insertions and deletions on paper with commentary "piled up in the margins" from tracked changes. Yes, marginalia is more foreboding than a simple strikethrough, but that's not a digital vs. hard copy issue. Comparing apples to apples, the deletions and insertions in track are just as visually simple as on paper. The article's suggestion of more in-lining, if applied to comments on conten…

>the deletions and insertions in track are just as visually simple as on paper

This really is an aesthetic claim you're making, and it goes against what many in publishing feel, which is that substantial edits through track changes are clearly more taxing, less comfortable, less intuitive and uglier than paper.

You're also confusing collaboration problems with editorial workflow problems. The author is writing from a copy editor's standpoint, which involves producing clean, professional quality copy through a vertical, step-by-step editorial process.