Concurrent editing of documentation

Discussion of ongoing programming work.
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Trilarion
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Location: Central germany

Concurrent editing of documentation

Post by Trilarion »

Just recently I've been become aware of Google docs. It allows to edit the same document from different places/persons in the world simultaneously and export afterwards in many formats. It's free. And since we are doing open source we do not have any secrets to loose anyway. This means Google docs is probably perfectly suited for us if more than one person needs to modify any file. We should keep this in mind for the following documents:
  • Design specifications
  • Programming specifications
  • Help documents (even translations)
  • ...
Veneteaou
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Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:23 am

Re: Concurrent editing of documentation

Post by Veneteaou »

Yes. Also, Google Sites integrate pretty well with everything, and permissions can be set for administration/editing/viewing even for the general public. They allow you to setup pages/documents in Wiki format, which tends to keep things organized. It also gives access to a bunch of other tools should you decide we need them.
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Trilarion
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Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: Concurrent editing of documentation

Post by Trilarion »

I now settled for restructured text because I think it is a standard for documentation (although more on the technical side, not everyone can contribute readily to it) and it is human readable and also not too difficult to learn (being a lightweight markup language). Since the documentation resides also on GitHub we have support for somewhat visual editing of the pages and with sphinx there are converters to PDF and/or HTML available.

This is most convenient for me and I'm quite confident all others wanting to contribute can actually send their material in any form and then it can be included in the restructured text files easily.

Pros: Relatively easy to modify, easy to version, easy to convert to PDF or HTML, clear structure of the content.

Con: You need to learn it, you need to use GitHub, media content still needs to be treated separate, more effort than just google docs.
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