Hi Will,
My preference on this would be able to work in Word. Splitting the
document up into the appropriate pieces will take a bit of work, but
that structure won't change often. I also think it would be useful
to hand the pen off on the different pieces pretty explicitly
outside the context of the version control system (basically during
our meetings).
Is there any reason not to use github for managing .doc files? Or
phrased another way is there any reason not to use .doc files on
github?
Bob Eberlein
On 9/1/2013 9:46 PM, Will Glass-Husain
wrote:
Hi,
Hope everyone (in the US) is enjoying their Labor Day
weekend.
In the last committee meeting, we split up the document
writing into various sections.
I'd like to propose we use version control while writing
the spec documents. This helps collaboration by seeing
changes added over time by various members of the group and
make it easier to provide comments.
I suggest one of the following two options.
The simplest (for most people) is to use Google Docs. You
can edit the document using a Microsoft Word like approach
(WYSIWYG). The document lives on line, formatted. Each time
it is changed and saved a version is stored. This allows us to
review the changes to the doc over time. Final version of the
doc may be downloaded as MS Word and if necessary additional
formatting applied. A benefit of this approach would be ease
of use for those familiar with Microsoft Word and other word
processors. A negative is that everything needs to be edited
online.
A second approach would be to use plain text documents
formatted with Markdown, and to use Github as version control.
The more technical members of the committee may prefer this.
Bobby powers (see appendix to my email) has assembled several
examples of how this would work. This would be a good
approach if everyone writing was comfortable with git and
version control. Github has something called a "pull request"
which makes it easy to comment on specific parts of a
document. The final document could be converted to PDF or
HTML.
Once we choose an approach, I can set everything up, with
Google Docs or Github. We should probably choose one approach
for the entire document.
Any comments?
WILL
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bobby Powers <>
Date: Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 6:38 PM
Subject: markdown example
To:
Here is the repo:
https://github.com/bpowers/xmile-doc
Here is a page with some of the things we want (code
blocks of XML, inline tags, and lists):
https://github.com/bpowers/xmile-doc/blob/master/2_container.md
And here is the source for that page:
https://raw.github.com/bpowers/xmile-doc/master/2_container.md
This is a pull request which can be used to manage
changes:
https://github.com/bpowers/xmile-doc/pull/1
And here is the markdown syntax:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
I didn't do a GDoc example - I think that is more
self explanatory (Word on a web page).
yours,
Bobby
