(no subject)

[seekingferret]

https://afternoon.io/draft

Writers looking for an online text editor that does revision control might want to check it out. I think it autosaves, but allows you to tag specific revisions to make it easier to revert to an older version. It may also have a few other git-like features for collaboration.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out how to use git proper for my own revision control. Because I'm weird.

Comments

[kindness_says]

WHAT RANDOM SERENDIPITY, FRIEND.

Well, specifically we're looking for something that combines the best features of Final Draft formatting and GoogleDocs collab ease mojo, but still nice to see this on my flist. Will past it on to the co- :D thanks!

[seekingferret]

No idea what Final Draft formatting is or how it works, but... if you're looking for something heavier duty, git/bzr/darcs might actually be the right thing?

Also, are you aware of LaTeX? LaTeX on top of any text editor solution is often the smartest way to handle formatting, though not always the most accessible or easiest for a beginner.

[kindness_says]

git/bzr/darcs

um, this is all just a lot of letters to me.

Haha, I'm familiar with LaTeX only in the sense that I know it's used for, like, math...

[seekingferret]

So LaTeX was designed by a computer scientist who wanted to figure out a way to create professional-quality typeset scientific journal articles on a computer. It's mostly used in the sciences and math (and linguistics), because in some ways it's overkill for anything else. It's incredibly good at handling formulas and weird symbols and strange arrangements of text on a page.

But LaTeX's core idea is simple and actually brilliant and useful in any kind of writing: First, you write the text. Then you worry about formatting it.

When you write in Word or any other WYSIWYG editor, the formatting you see on the screen is how it will print. This tricks you into thinking about formatting as part of the authorship process along with actually writing. When you're doing the initial writing of something in LaTeX, you only tag your writing with semantic tags- tags that indicate structurally what function a piece of text serves in your story- whether it's a heading, or part of a chapter, or part of a scene, or a line of dialogue in a script. Then, when you're done writing you apply a set of formats to it and LaTeX formats your document according to those rules. All lines of dialogue get automatically formatted correctly so long as you've marked it as dialogue. All stage directions are automatically formatted as stage directions. etc...

If you decide that for some reason you want to reformat all the dialogue slightly differently, you just change the formatting rules and reapply the formatting and it magically updates everything.

darcs/bzar/git are full-blown revision control systems. They're used to track versions of a file and allow comparison and reversion and sharing and collaboration between different people. They're designed for programmers, but I have a theory that they might be useable for other kinds of writing- but I'm still experimenting and trying to prove out this theory.

[kindness_says]

I've definitely found that to be true :) about words first, format later to not get bogged down... I have a lot of issues with that.

Oooooh, cool, interesting (although I'm not a programmer so I'm not sure how much a learning curve there'd be if I tried out these). Thanks for the history/ideas!!