Bug 145011 - [wish] OpenOffice/MSOffice-like track changes as a collaborative editing support in Kile
Summary: [wish] OpenOffice/MSOffice-like track changes as a collaborative editing supp...
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: kile
Classification: Applications
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Platform: Fedora RPMs Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Michel Ludwig
URL:
Keywords:
: 144447 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2007-05-04 10:47 UTC by Jiri Biba
Modified: 2009-02-15 02:42 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Jiri Biba 2007-05-04 10:47:40 UTC
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.6)
Installed from:    Fedora RPMs
OS:                Linux

I am missing any support for a collaborative editing of LaTeX documents (shared and versioned e.g. by CVS or SVN)
like MS Word/OO Writer track changes system. Even with a LaTeX-aware text merger for CVS/SVN there is still no way
of simple overview about changes made by co-authors, but CVS/SVN diff, that are not really "inline" when writing the document. 

If Kile had a support of projects (commonly used in IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse, etc.), such versioning might be
kept separatelly from the TeX file (i.e. the TeX file would be the final version comprehensive for TeX compiler
and usable without Kile in any other LaTeX-publishing system) as a kind of extended diff file that could be easilly
merged by CVS.

Another way (maybe easier and more feasible) would be to make CVS diffs awailable in Kile on the fly (e.g. a text would be coloured according to different authors and a mouse hint would say who is the author, to which CVS version
the text belongs and on which date/time it has been committed). Then, Kile would not need a support of projects at all as all such functionality would use already existing records of CVS or SVN client which are used in a collaborative editing anyway. The only remaining problem is retrieving the diffs from CVS to make this working. Perhaps, in a Kile projects these things might be kept and build incrementally with using CVS/SVN versioning.
Comment 1 Michel Ludwig 2007-05-05 22:21:17 UTC
Collaborative editing support is definitely an interesting feature for Kile.

But I'm not sure about what you mean by "projects"? Kile actually has support for projects...

Michel
Comment 2 Michel Ludwig 2007-05-06 00:16:11 UTC
*** Bug 144447 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Jiri Biba 2007-05-07 11:11:43 UTC
Well, I am not at Kile at the moment to check that, but does Kile store the "project" information in the directory where the root of LaTeX documents is? Is not it storing into ~/.kile or somewhere into KDE user configuration? Perhaps I am incorrect, but I do not see any benefit if all the data were not stored in a project directory so that it could be commited to CVS as whole or zipped and transferred to another computer (e.g. when you need to take your work offline for a weekend on a notebook). Anyway, I can choose to create a new file (and the wizard lets me choose the type of document I am going to work on), but I am not aware of any explicit visibility of the fact I am currently working with a "project". All in all, this bug/wish is not primarily about projects.

On account of the fixed line usage - good way to bypass the problem of merging, but basically it does not solve the problem when cooperating with someone who works e.g. on MS Windows in WinEdit. The idea was, that CVS mergers are not always capable of handling the new lines appropriatelly from the LaTeX point of view where wrapping by new lines in one paragraph does not affect the resulting composition. Should the collaborative support be based on CVS/SVN diff records and the merging was LaTeX-aware, it would not mind if your collaborators used other means than Kile. And that is what I would like :). 

Jiri Biba
Comment 4 Boris 2009-02-15 02:42:19 UTC
Tracking changes probably isn't possible to do within the latex format without wrting a new style, though somebody seems to have made a start (http://trackchanges.sourceforge.net/).

You might be interested in the latexdiff package. This compares two document versions and outputs a nice latex version with coloured text and strikethroughs etc. Is uses diff so its algorithm is more intelligent than the change tracking in Word.

Regarding collaborative editing, the following projects might be of interest:
ikiwiki
latexki
http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Austin_J._Che/Extensions/LatexDoc

A combination of all three would be ideal...