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Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. I respect GitHub more and more every day. However, despite how much I love the GitHub model and think it's a great way to collaborate, it's still (mostly) inaccessible for non-developers. Shameless plug: I think there is still some room for innovation here, so I'm building a GitHub for everyone else:

http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers

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I wish we could use Git for scientific papers and legislation. I think the "Pull Request" model makes a lot of sense in both of those cases.

The last paper I published (IEEE for SC12) was written almost exclusively through a private Github repo. We didn't even think about using anything else -- it just worked. It helps that all of the authors were comfortable with TeX however.

Yeah, GitHub for papers is really hampered in fields that don't regularly use TeX.

In work I accidentally discovered once that Microsoft Word (and Excel) supports three-way-merges natively, so there's at least that for non-TeX folks.

Now that MS Word uses zipped xml as their format you can make some progress by specifying a custom diff driver which pipes the plain text to stdout.

https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gitattribut...

Just go with markdown?

As much as I'd like to, I doubt my collaborators would go for it - I work with a lot of clinicians using ancient computers with a stable, predictable work pattern, and they are understandably content with that.

People who don't use TeX for accessibility reasons might want to give it another look. The tooling has risen in quality and accessibility hugely of late. I use TexPad[1] - which I like enormously.

Otherwise, as another commenter mentioned, there is always Markdown. Combined with MathJax[2] and custom style sheets you see many of the same benefits with greatly increased simplicity. A great desktop Markdown editor (if people don't like web based ones) is Mou[3].

Lastly - the advantage to using Markdown is that if you have to work with someone who does use TeX - something like pandoc[4] can be used to convert between formats fairly nicely.

One thing I think is missing is a "Make" like program to dictate how to combine multiple Markdown or TeX documents into a single document, which folders to scan for references etc. I've seen a couple of home grown solutions - but nothing that really fit the bill.

[1]: https://www.texpadapp.com/

[2]: http://www.mathjax.org/

[3]: http://mouapp.com/

[4]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

We do use Git for scientific papers internally. Especially in the proof reading stage we find it is the only manageable way to have multiple people provide constructive feedback to a paper in a limited time frame.

This has caught on with almost everyone (technically minded I should add) who has been exposed to the approach, so I wouldn't be surprised if this started to catch on in the wider field of Scientific publishing and Conference calls.

As a developer myself, I know it's hard to put a timetable on these kinds of things. That said, do you have a vague idea of when this is going to be released?

I'm on a Debate team, and this would be an awesome tool to collaborate on cases. I would use Github for it, but my team is not too tech savvy.

Oh, and is this going to be open source? I'd love to help out with this project.

Simply branching, making edits and PR's is not that difficult. You should consider trying Github for your use-case before you totally dismiss it. It's not as if the command-line tool is required.

The on-site editor on GitHub was a really great addition of recent.

Might want to look at https://www.authorea.com/ as well.

Open alpha up right now [1]. I'm not pushing it too hard because there are still some usability issues and bugs to work out, but its getting there.

[1] http://penflip.com

Awesome! I'm signed up for alpha! Thanks!

A standard markup language for flows would be a good idea, too.

I think Github agrees. I have a feeling their 100M investment from Andreesen will be used for this goal.

Cool. I agreet that there is defintely a lot of things GitHub is missing. A few ones I did myself:

3D Visualization of popular formats: https://github.com/danielribeiro/three-hub

Syntax Highlight on Diffs: https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-highlight-exten...

What exactly is wrong with using Google Docs for writing that makes this better?

Heck, now that the Google Drive Realtime Collaboration API exists, he might as well build his system on top of that.

https://developers.google.com/drive/realtime/reference/

I haven't used the realtime API specifically, but my experiences building a startup around the Drive API leaves me extremely wary about relying on Google/Drive for anything critical. I currently wrap any call to their api in a try_5_times function since they 500 so frequently, and have to put all drive-related tasks in an exponential-backoff queue even after that for when they go down more seriously. Not what I'd want for core realtime functionality.

Would be very curious to hear from others who've used the actual realtime api, however.

I don't see Penflip as a replacement for Google Docs, but there are some cases where Docs breaks down - specifically when there are too many collaborators and when the content is too complex. Another interesting aspect is the need for multiple versions of the same core content - like a syllabus or textbook - with minor variations and modifications as needed. Something like this is unacheivable with Google Docs.

For small groups working on a short research paper, Google Docs is great. But could you imagine a book being written with Google Docs, especially with multiple people? That'd be completely unmanageable.

I love the HoTT book [1], because it's a great example of using GitHub to write a book with multiple contributors, and really illustrates the shortcomings with other technology [2].

[1] https://github.com/HoTT/book

[2] http://math.andrej.com/2013/06/20/the-hott-book/

It's nice to see the contextual diff as struck out text and highlighted text instead of the usual line by line thing.

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