

Someone please fix text-editing software - WORST
http://wrst.ca/?p=412

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brownbat
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 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.)

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laurenbee
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.

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Pxtl
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."

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brownbat
> 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](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306484)

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

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wfjackson
How 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?

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ronaldx
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.

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pmichaud
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?

~~~
Pxtl
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.

~~~
pmichaud
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).

