Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[Joost Kremers]

David Reitter wrote:
> I often collaborate with people on documents and it's useful to see  
> what changes they've made.  Many of my collaborators will want to use  
> Word, if only for its nice change-tracking feature.

well, i guess *any* method of tracking changes in emacs won't be compatible with
.doc or .docx files anyway, so isn't it pointless to try and do this in emacs?
or do you think all of your collaborators would be willing to use emacs if only
a decent "track changes" option were available?

> I would need a combination of highlight-changes-mode and a way to save  
> and load the change history of a buffer into a file, just like MS Word  
> does it (with the new open docx format).

highlight-changes-mode uses text properties to track changes. the elisp manual
describes a theoretical method of saving text properties to a file:

(info "elisp (Format Conversion Piecemeal)")

but a quick google search suggests no-one has actually implemented it.

> All in all, I'm missing good Emacs support for non-concurrent  
> (asynchronous) real-time editing.  Suggestions would be welcome.

i guess a good way would be to augment highlight-changes-mode with the necessary
functions to save the text properties it uses to a file and reading them back
in. but that would take some elisp hacking...


-- 
Joost Kremers                                      joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)