Quote:
Originally Posted by Keryl Raist
I do this with my books. Word has both a change tracking feature which allows each user to put comments/changes in a different color, and then merge or unmerge as you so desire.
The base document sits all by it's lonesome, doing basically nothing for most of the time. The versions go out and play. Eventually they get merged together, with different changes as needed. Then the new, merged doc gets compared to the original, and then yet another new doc of the original and merged version gets made. That doc is then the one that gets to become the eventual book.
But at each step copies are kept. I might have seventeen versions of my novel before I get to the one I'm going to print from.
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I've never had good luck using Word's change tracking features (for writing software specs, not manuscripts
) and would much rather rely on CVS, Subversion, Git, etc to manage versions. Of course those work best with plain text documents, which Word docs are not, but HTML docs
are plain text ...
(and Word's change tracking plus Sharepoint's built-in version control for Word documents prove that Word can be handled by a version control system, you just need something that understands the format rather than something purpose-built for plain text source code. I suspect there's a niche market out there for this type of software, if someone were interested ...)