Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It's all what you are used to. I had an interesting exchange in email with a UK Professor a while back. He (and those like him) use LaTeX, which is just the thing for typesetting mathematics. There are an assortment of editors explicitly designed to write and edit LaTeX documents. He found himself required to use Word by his publisher.
Computer developers use Distributed Version Control Systems. These are essentially shared online code repositories, that let developers in different geographic areas collaborate. The most popular one these days is an open source effort called Git, originally created by Linux author Linus Torvalds.
In a DVCS, a developer writes code, and "commits" it to the repository. Another developer working on that code "checks out" the version in the repository, and makes changes, then commits the changes back to the repository. The repository code analyzes what is different in the new commit, and saves only the parts that changed as a "diff" to the original. A developer can reconstruct the code at any desired point by checking out the original and applying all the diffs up to the desired state.
Program code is contained in text files, where creating diffs is easy. Text files are line based. What lines changed? Save only those as a diff. Binary files are another matter.
My correspondent was trying to figure out how to store Word documents in Git with versioning. In older forms of Word where MS was still using a proprietary binary format (that changed with every new release,) it essentially wasn't possible. These days, MS uses an XML format as underlying storage for all their applications, and XML is text based. If you can get to the XML, you might be able to stuff it into Git and do proper versioning.
I mentioned this, but he couldn't locate the XML. I had to tell him MS wrapped the Word document in a Zip file to save space, and he would need to open the Zip file and extract the XML to do what he wanted. He was clueless about what Word did, because he never had to deal with it before. Word was not what folks in his field used to document results.
(I never did find out if he got anywhere with it. You can stuff Word documents into Git, but it will treat them as binary blobs. The sort of versioning developers want, where you can look at diffs to see what changed in a new version can't happen, because diffs won't exist. DVCSes let developer attach comments to commits about what they did, but that's not the same thing.)
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Dennis
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Yes, you could stuff Word into Git, but then getting it back out and getting the XML back into a viable Word document, not so much. Honestly, to be boring, using plain old Track Changes would be better.
I realize that people are accustomed to different things. But that's one of the reasons that our form is DEAD SIMPLE. I mean, we use the same sort of thing that Random House uses, Createspace used, etc., to try to keep it easier than easy.
When someone says to me that our instructions are "too complicated," 99% of the time, with anyone of normal intelligence, that really means "I'm too lazy to read the instructions."
What chaps my ass is that 99% of the time, our customers have a) never done this before; b) never used an eBook before or c) never proofed a PDF in Acrobat before; c) don't have the eBook-reading software on their computers, and need to acquire, dl and install those (part of the instructions) and d) have NO idea what to expect with any of the above.
Our instructions have to encompass ALL of that cruft (which I bloody well resent), and they do, including updating them constantly to meet whatever new thing Amazon or Apple, etc. do. To then get told that despite the fact that they came to use completely unprepared, and still haven't bothered to learn anything at all about
any of the above and
then expect everything to "just magically work," without any effort at all...yes, that makes me psycho. ("Yes, I want to be a publisher, with making zero effort at all to learn any of those jobs, tasks, duties or knowledge, and worse, I'm going to expect YOU to do all that for me.")
Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
Hitch