[texworks] Document Version-ing and synctex Previewing

[Charlie Sharpsteen]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de>wrote:

>   > I've always felt that TeX is starting to lag behind other document
>  > preparation systems in the collaborative editing/review
>  > area. Microsoft Word has had "track changes" and other review
>  > systems for years. Apple just announced an Auto Save feature as
>  > part of OS X 10.7 that automatically tracks snapshots and allows
>  > one to browse the entire timeline of a document and drag document
>  > components back and forth between versions. We definitely have the
>  > tools to do similar things in the TeX world, but it is difficult to
>  > get an entire team of people to buy into them. Asking someone to
>  > learn TeX plus a version control system all at once can be a tough
>  > sell. If version control was built into the editor in a transparent
>  > fashion, it would be a lot easier for newcomers to deal with.
>
> People are using TeX with version control systems for decades.
> It's Microsoft which always lags behind.
>
> If you add libgit to TeXworks, will this help if people collaborate
> with others who are using other VC systems already?  Wouldn't it be
> better to add an interface to external VC systems?
>
> Regards,
>  Reinhard


The people that I am thinking about are those that have never used TeX or a
version control system before---often it is just too overwhelming for them
to learn both things at once. If we leveraged something like libgit2 to add
basic version control that is largely transparent to end users, say just
commit, revert and diff, that seems like it would serve the purpose of
"lowering the entry barrier to the TeX world". It could also make life
easier for the one person on the team who knows how to use a version control
system as they would be able to import changelogs rather than manually
checking in all of the changes generated by their teammates.

-Charlie
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