Someone please fix text-editing software
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#2How much is she or her peers willing to pay? How much do the existing tools she mentioned cost?
How does the hard copy method handle multiple editors/reviewers?
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#3How much is she or her peers willing to pay? How much do the existing tools she mentioned cost? How does the hard copy method handle multiple editors/reviewers?
The existing (annoying) tools she mentioned seem to be simply Word and printing things out on paper.
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#4Outside 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."
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#5Outside 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."
I think people who use certain software full-time and in a professional setting experience it in a completely different way than people who use it only occasionally. Few people outside of publishing seem to spend truly long stretches of time in Word.
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#6How much is she or her peers willing to pay? How much do the existing tools she mentioned cost? How does the hard copy method handle multiple editors/reviewers?
I'm really interested in this project: a request from a particular industry to provide a valuable, bespoke product. I'm ready and willing to work on something like that.
But the above questions are important.
"Track Changes" is included with Microsoft Office (so we compete with free). Printing on paper is also free.
A worse problem: the article is not clear enough about what editors would actually value.
Dear Karina Palmitesta: Commission someone to build exactly what you want, get your staff to test it and provide relevant feedback. You should expect to pay for this. If you believe you can sell this to your peers, negotiate a profit-sharing agreement. You should still expect to pay for this.
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#7Seems 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?
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#8Seems 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?
Sounds like you just described https://draftin.com/
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#9The 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 content from multiple editors, would be a nightmare. You wouldn't be able to fit some sentences on the screen; they'd be crowded out by all the interruptions.
The article also complains that small punctuation changes can become tedious. That's also true in either form, and the solution is probably organizational. You can reserve a punctuation (and S/V agreement, spacing, etc.) pass for right before publication, or just have a standing agreement that minor cleanup needn't go in track (just accept those yourself as you insert them).
I feel like the most significant failing of track isn't when comparing it to paper. If you're widely circulating a doc for comments, merging edits from a dozen commenters is its own special form of hell. That's true on paper, too, but not in editors that allow real time collaboration, like Google Docs. (That's admittedly a tradeoff, depends on how much you want a single individual acting as gatekeeper for all changes.)
Re: Someone please fix text-editing software
#10Outside 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.