Re: Collaborative editing and persistently tracking changes

[Andreas Röhler]

David Reitter wrote:
> How would one track changes in Emacs and mark them up directly in an
> Emacs buffer?
>
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> One option would be to use some sort of repository, or to store
> versions of files before and after the changes and use M-x diff.  But
> that doesn't do a good job of tracking in-line changes (in times of
> soft-wrapping, paragraphs are file lines!), and obviously I can't
> force my collaborators to use extra tools.  The added pain of having
> to manage multiple file versions is also considerable, and there's
> limited extra benefit in versioning repositories with, say,
> manuscripts.  You hardly ever want to inspect older history, or go
> back to a previous version.  (Having separate branches might work
> well, but it's hard to get collaborators to commit to this technical
> overhead. And again, even git's merge algorithm is line-based.)
>
> All in all, I'm missing good Emacs support for non-concurrent
> (asynchronous) real-time editing.  Suggestions would be welcome.
>
> - David Reitter
>
>
>

What about to translate doc-format into odt, as used by openoffice?
These are xml-files basically AFAIK, which may be set under a VC-system
like bazaar, RCS, whatever - and edited with emacs xml-mode.

Andreas