
Draft. Version control for writing - revorad
http://ninjasandrobots.com/draft-version-control-for-writing
======
jmduke
This looks cool, but my immediate thought was that the documents most in need
of version control (and Word offers version control, but its hardly as elegant
as what this purports) are the most complex ones: annual reports, long-form
works, things that require the complex document elements that make Word feel
so bloated sometimes. (Not to mention that these are documents that need to be
worked on offline.)

Branding this service as a webapp seems like it's going to make those use
cases impossible.

~~~
nate
Thanks! Well so the inspiration for this came from just trying to get my wife
to proof read my blog posts. Even a 600 word post ends up becoming a pain. I'd
end up sending her a google doc, or email or whatever. She would end up
copying and pasting it into a word doc and then resending to me so I could
review her changes and only manually try to merge in the things I wanted.

I've found that even a couple friends can get a whole lot of use from Draft to
edit something simple. I hear you though, and am definitely paying attention
to the use cases. We'll see how it shakes out.

~~~
e40
Why didn't she highlight the change she wanted to make in google docs and make
a comment on it? That would have been easier for both of you, I think.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
(Not the OP) Because that takes too much effort. For big pieces of general
criticism maybe, but for rearranging a sentence or fixing a typo adding
comments in the margins has too much overhead.

------
bonaldi
Looks good. Similar in principle to how a lot of newspaper production systems
(Quark Publishing System/Quark CopyDesk, Atex etc) work - store major
revisions alongside autosaves.

One comment: the diff screen is a bit too programmery. "har" vs "av" is
impossible to accept/reject just from looking at it - you have to parse the
context and work out what the words are. "Sharing" vs "Saving" or "Insanley"
vs "Insanely" is much easier to immediately yes/no.

~~~
nate
Very true. Thanks for the feedback. I'll see how I can correct that.

------
masnick
This is a great idea. Microsoft Word-style version control (track changes) is
not nearly as simple and powerful as Git (assuming you have already wrapped
your head around Git, which isn't a reasonable expectation for many non-
programmers).

I would love to have something like this for collaborating with non-technical
authors on academic papers. Having a granular view of changes in an academic
paper (or really any technical document) is really important, especially if
you have grad students or research assistants making changes that need to be
approved by the principle investigator.

Google Docs sort of does this, but it doesn't support any kind of citation
management. (All citation management possibly excepting Papers2 sucks; BibTex
seems too technical; but this is a whole other thing.)

But this looks way better than version control in Google Docs. If it really is
easy to use and it works with some system for citation/bibliography
management, I think academics would love it.

(Academia is the place where I personally see the greatest need for this. I
don't mean to ignore or detract from other use cases that may be more
prevalent.)

~~~
_ZeD_
Have you tryed LyX?

from <http://www.lyx.org/Features>:

    
    
        Document management
            Change tracking
            Support for external version control systems (RCS, CVS, SVN)
            Comparison of different versions of the document
            Branches for having different versions of the same document
            Yellow sticky notes

~~~
takluyver
I've tried LyX. It's not bad, but the killer is, as houshuang says,
collaborating with other people. It's not simple or slick enough that I can
ask my supervisor to set it up to add his comments on a paper. I sent him PDFs
for a while, but when I couldn't get the Bibtex references formatted quite
right, I gave up and used a word processor. I'd love to see something better
in this space.

(I'm not the poster you replied to, I just have a similar view)

------
jonnathanson
Have you considered an industry vertical? Version control is a _huge-beyond-
huge_ annoyance in the legal profession, or frankly, in any profession
involving group work on contracts. I imagine you could make a decent chunk of
change going the enterprise route and selling this to big firms, or licensing
it to schools, or what have you.

~~~
kelv
Working in an industry where Manuals and Policy/Procedure documents dictate, I
would also love this.

Eg. in the heavily regulated airline industry, Framemaker still persists as
standard. Changes are typically made against a PDF as comments (handwritten or
PDF annotations), attached to a paper "Manual Change Request" form and signed
by manual owner and passed to a Tech Writer to replicate the change in
Framemaker. Turnarounds in order of months are incurred, and where the
regulator is involved, I have seen years.

A Git-style version control workflow would work well: \- allowing
collaboration \- change documentation and approval is built in (even better if
regulator can use it) \- publishing smaller amendments while larger ones
develop \- reuse modules across manuals (eg. org charts)

However, uptake will occur when the learning curve is reduced...such as a well
designed web UI

~~~
eru
Pull requests seem especially apt.

------
newishuser
Why not just build an editor that works off git? Then you could abstract it
from the user _and_ leverage all the existing ways of sharing text like github
and bitbucket.

 _"But even as a developer it’s full of headaches."_ is also just plain not
true.

~~~
karthik_ram
Exactly. I'm an academic who uses and promotes git (for research, analysis,
and writing). My colleague and I are building a markdown editor with git
support. We're going for exactly what you describe. git is abstracted from the
user and they just provide GitHub credentials to have everything stored in a
repo.

Non programming types use the gui and programming types can directly interact
with the repo.

See (super early version) here: <https://github.com/yoavram/markx>

~~~
ef4
That sounds great, I would love such a tool.

------
sushimako
lflux[0] is a new (open-source) journalism effort/plattform, using similar
version-control for their articles in order to provide a different view on how
online-journalism could work.

The core idea (as far as i understand it) is to have topic-based journalism
and a single, evolving main-article per topic. This article always represents
the status quo and received updates/changes/additions when news happen,
instead of publishing multiple event-based articles over time and relate them
by means of categories, tags or else. A "timeline" will give an overview on
how the article evolved (using a diffing algorithm similar to the one
mentioned in TFA).

So if you want to read about the current state of affairs of - say -
Fukushima, you wouldn't have to search through the latest x articles to find
out what's going on. You'd rather check the (singleton) "Fukushima" article
and could see the chronological changes in its timeline.

They have a showcase-install online [1], which covers a few topics ([2],
german) and is in fact maintained and authored by participating journalists.

[0] <https://github.com/luminousflux/lflux>

[1] <http://onon.at/>

[2] <http://onon.at/wehrpflicht/>

~~~
haraball
Another related one is <http://interior.substance.io/>, an "open platform for
collaborative composition and sharing of digital documents."

------
Eliezer
This is why I use Scrivener - it's _modular_.

Scrivener with Track Changes and Etherpad-style collaborative editing would be
perfect to the point where nobody would use anything else.

------
ismarc
While this looks kind of interesting, I've seen a large number of things that
fall into this vein, and a few concepts seem to be missing (conflict
resolution being a big one). Independent of that, though, when I first started
working on my book, there were two tools I quickly needed but could not find.
The first being a way to save references that linked outside of the document
without being part of the document (think fact checking, reference materials,
etc.). The second was a way to edit the document(s) and be able to compose
sections/components together at a high level. I ended up using muse mode for
emacs and fossil as an VCS (the wiki is particularly helpful for collecting
resources). What I ended up doing is several files on different topics, then
one for each chapter and then one for the book as a whole. Then it's versioned
text copy and pasted between files. If anyone has a better system for linking
to references and managing the structure of the book, I'd love to hear it.

~~~
andrewflnr
Did you consider Scrivener? I'm not sure about version control, but it's
supposed to handle references and definitely handles the composition-from-
smaller-parts thing. It's designed for long works. I used the windows beta for
a fairly long school paper, and it helped a lot.

~~~
ismarc
I had looked at it, but none of the writer friends I have had any experience
with it. I'll give it a shot now that it has had a recommendation from someone
who has actually used it.

------
ICWiener
I spend a lot of time writing technical documentation, in Org-Mode, LaTeX, and
so on. In order to collaborate efficiently with others, we need to have a
strict line wrap policy (one line = one sentence), so that diffs are easier to
understand (e.g. under emacs, auto-fill breaks paragraphs formatting). Since
Draft is designed for writing, how does it handle diffs?

------
reissbaker
I keep notes in Vim+Dropbox on my laptop and Byword+Dropbox on my phone for
easy syncing and simple, distraction-free editing. A webapp would be a great
alternative if it's also usable from a phone. A single interface for
everything, always kept up to date, with no distractions. If it could export
to a local file for backups (or running notes through Markdown, if they become
coherent enough), even better.

Congrats so far: it looks beautiful. And I have a few writer friends who would
probably find something like this useful, especially the collaborative editing
parts.

------
chalst
For collaborative editing, getting change tracking right is important - I
literally could not do my job without it. I listed three parts of what I
called my _change-tracking minimum_ in defence of a qn I asked at the tex.sx:

[http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8704/can-lyx-
syntax-f...](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8704/can-lyx-syntax-files-
override-document-class-defaults)

If you can get change tracking to work nicely with modern distributed version
control, you are a star. I have lots of ideas...

------
jpalmucci
This sounds similar to <http://revisionator.com>. It's also a web based editor
with built in revision control. And, it has moderated documents so you can
selectively accept / reject changes.

Someone mentioned conflict resolution. When someone does an unclean merge, it
steps you though conflict resolution with the GUI.

It even has branches with merging. (Try copying a document and it creates a
branch.)

------
Giszmo
Normally when I ask people to review a draft, I put it into an etherpad.
Etherpad also features version control to the letter, concurrent editing,
tagging of versions, editor colors.

Sure, for anything that requires formatting, it would fail but "draft" has yet
to proof it is a full-bloated … uhm … featured word processor.

------
programminggeek
This is probably not a brilliant question, but why this instead of git for
version control and um editing directly on github? With Github zen mode, you
can edit a document directly on the site and every save is in stored in git.

~~~
adam
This is true, but think about how opaque github is for a non
programmer/blogger (one of the use cases the OP mentions) vs. what he's put
together which is truly about as simple as you can get in terms of getting
started with a version controlled collaborative doc.

------
jvdh
It would be insanely cool if this would be LaTeX compatible. I'm using git
currently to manage drafts of articles I'm writing, but the diff tool is not
always up to par, and it's hard for non-coders to adapt to this system.

------
arikrak
It would be good if a program let you view each sentences history on its own,
so you could see different alternatives without needing to change the whole
document.

------
Johnyma22
Check out <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbpbMeDgTF8> for historical
document search :)

------
ctbeiser
It's an interesting concept, but how does it differ (not technically, but
practically) from, say, OS X's built-in document version control, "Versions"?

------
JacobJans
I think this might be exactly what I need for working with the freelance
writers that I hire. I'm looking forward to giving it a try!

------
clintboxe
Looks great Nathan! Can't wait to try it out.

------
dbecker
I haven't looked at this in depth, but I'm glad to see someone is doing this.
We need it.

------
Azrael
We use Mediawiki. Tracks revisions, lets you rollback, let's you make
comments, let's you provide reasons for changes, gives you easy diffs...you
can do a private wiki for specific project, or projects. It's free, open
source and extensible, the data is portable, easy to move from one SQL to
another.

Book it, done.

------
intellection
<http://revisionator.com> does too.

What we need is open source, so all that writing, and all that revision
history, is downloadable, liberated data.

~~~
jpalmucci
<http://revisionator.com> does allow you to download the document and all its
revision history. (download button in the document's page.)

------
af3
__OFFTOP __: can someone enlighten me about SVBTLE thing on the left column. I
have seen this logo on several blogs. Cannot figure out what is that.

thanks.

~~~
marklabedz
<https://svbtle.com/>

