I am very serious about starting using version control for academic writing. And it is not as if you had nothing to do with it. When doing some reading along these lines I stumbled about some of your articles in Practex journal. Although you advocated using Subversion back then, the message for me was to use any kind of versioning system at all.
The last time doing a manual merge of three documents from different authors was an absolute nightmare and took a lot of time. Even if I were using version control for myself only, I'd imagine I could still put it to good use by feeding it my coauthors works after converting them to plain text myself. This is actually one of my reasons I am favouring MultiMarkdown over pure Latex at the moment as it is human readable and easy to convert to *.rtf or eben *.doc format.
Christoph
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 9:15 PM, Mark Eli Kalderon <
eli@markelikalderon.com> wrote:
My two cents:
The most important thing is that you use version control. I have been
a happy Subversion user for three years now, but eventually found
myself frustrated with its merging facilities and am now learning Git
(since it allows you to cherry pick the changes you want to merge).
For your purposes, however, I would not recommend Git (not quite cross
platform since it lacks a Windows implementation, I think) and its UI
is not as nice as some alternatives.
I think you might try Mercurial or Bazaar.
There are advantages to using a distributed version control system as
opposed to a centralized one like Subversion, but really any of
Subversion, Mercurial, or Bazaar would suit your needs.
They are all easy to install. Since you don't have Leopard yet (which
has Subversion preinstalled) you can use Martin Ott's OS X binary.[1]
The first two chapters of the Subversion book (available free online)
should be enough to get you working with subversion in an afternoon.[2]
There are binaries for OS X and Windows for Mercurial (I think that
Mercurial also comes with keychain support on OS X).[3] Like
Subversion, it comes with a nice manual.[4]
Finally, Bazaar also comes with binaries for OS X and Windows.[5] And
also has extensive documentation.[6]
You might be well served by downloading them all, spend a weekend
playing with a couple toy repositories and think about how they might
work best with your envisioned work flow. (Bazaar seems particularly
flexible in this regard.)
Glad to hear that you are seriously considering version control. Good
luck.
All the best, Mark
[1] http://homepage.mac.com/martinott/
[2] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
[3] http://mercurial.berkwood.com/
[4] http://hgbook.red-bean.com/
[5] http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download
[6] http://bazaar-vcs.org/Documentation