Re: About exporting

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Martin Steffen <msteffen@ifi.uio.no> writes:

>
> There is one case where I do _NOT_ use org for such documents (though I
> use org basically most things I do), and that is
>
>      collaborative editing,
>
> working together on a document (maybe shared by git), at least with a
> document of some amount of complexity and typesetting requirement.
>

Yes, this is still the big unresolved challenge. The sad truth is people
think editing using word and 'track changes' is a good way to do
collaborative documents. I found it was actually pretty bad once you had
more than 2 people working on the document. It really only worked well
if the collaborators worked in serial i.e. one after the other and you
had a single file which just had track changes on it.

My 'solution', which wasn't great, but which I still preferred to
fighting word and track changes, was to send out the document exported
as ascii from org, to each collaborator and told them 'just edit it,
don't worry about formatting, I'll fix that'.

I would then use diff on the returned ascii files to combine them back
into a single ascii file, convert that back to ork and then export the
final form in whatever format was required. This had a couple of
advantages and disadvantages -

Advantages were I had control over the final document. Was actually
useful to release PDFs stamped with 'draft' until agreement was reached
and then issue a single final document. It is amazing how much confusion
can exist in large organisations because multiple versions of some
document are floating around and people lose track of which was the
final version.

Other advantage was I simply didn't have to deal with word. Even doing
all the diff combining (using Emacs of course!) and re-formatting was
faster for me with org than fighting with word and trying to get a good
looking final word document which contains heaps of conflicting styles
etc. (dig into the metadata for a Word document which has been shred and
edited by multiple people and you will know what I mean!).

Disadvantages included some people just not being able to deal with
editing a plain ascii document - just too use to word processing and
found the whole process frustrating. Also, in some situations, people
hated giving up control of the document.

The other somewhat ironic disadvantage was that the organisation was use
to ugly and badly formatted word documents which had a heap of
organisation format 'policy' which you had to comply with (type of font,
font size, margins, line spacing etc. I had to 'uglify' the latex output
in order to make the documents look like other documents produced in the
organisation. This took a bit of effort, but at least once it was done,
I could re-use the setup.

Funny thing was, whenever I produced a document which was just produced 
with un-uglified Latex, I would typically get comments about what a nicely formatted
document it was. Nobody ever said that with documents which complied
with the organisation's 'policy'!

-- 
Tim Cross