Re: pretty impressive but...

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Eric S. Johansson <esj@harvee.org> wrote:
>
> for collaborative editor, my gold standard is buzzword by Adobe.  Yes it's
> closed doors, yes it's another data roach motel but, it works so well, I
> don't care.
>
> How does it work well?  Well, I can blow things up full-screen and I have a
> dark writer like environment.  Minimal UI, graphics, graphics leading your
> focus to the text and nothing but text, marginal comments that, when
> selected, highlight what the user is commenting on (selected region).  Other
> than the fact it still sucks for speech recognition, only manages files
> slightly better than most other word processors, and it is sometimes cranky
> about flash and doesn't work on a Macintosh, it's pretty darn good.
>
> I tried to make the collaborative editor thing work with a friend of mine
> but, she couldn't get the linux version to work right in part because it
> kept asking for a jabber ID.  There were some other things wrong that escape
> me at this point but it was not fun.  If someone is willing to suffer the,
> working with a new user learning, let me know and I'll give you access to my
> document.
>

Hi Eric,
           Thank you for your clearly articulated views and comments.
Have you tried our http://abicollab.net webservice?

It does quite a lot of what you want though by no means all. We have
various types of author control but not as fine grained as you
requested. It is entirely possible to use the history feature of
http://abicollab.net to see an earlier version of your doc while you
type in your current version.

We allow direct publishing to the internet in html, pdf or any of a
number of different formats.

We are a full-on word processor. Our annotation feature in 2.8 does
things differently to margin notes but I personally prefer the way we
do things to margin notes. In our feature the annotation comments can
be hidden or fully exposed and printed. They appear at the bottom of
the page if wanted like footnotes. They popup with a mouse hover
always. The issue with "find the remote user" is greatly sinmplified
through our webservice http://abicollab.net where we also make it as
easy as possible to extract your documents in whatever form you like.

It is entirely possible to go completely fully screen with AbiWord so
that only the top menu bar is visible and all page controls are
removed.

Have a look at some the documents describing the http://abicollab.net
at these links:

https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/7851/latest
https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/3276/latest
https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/9886/latest
https://abicollab.net/documents/embed/10651/latest

All those links were written in AbiWord. They all update as soon as I
press "save" in AbiWord.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to help us find partners.
Your ideas for developing the feature for online publishing are very
interesting but we need partners to take the ideas forward.

Best regards,

Martin Sevior

> Now I know my needs are not worth as much as a pisshole in the snow but in
> case you're interested, here's what I could use.
>
> 1) Compatibility with speech recognition:
> http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&ved=0CBsQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fct.scansoft.com%2Fcustomerfiles%2Fkbasefiles%2F5176%2Fwp_WinAppsCompatibleWithDNS.pdf&ei=jf32StCMKouo8AbKoIDzCQ&usg=AFQjCNHTGijNCA6Lof19N7jvyE-6MclgPw&sig2=aAAnMyC93KUiU8U2fztoog
>
>
> or
>
> http://tinyurl.com/nscompat
>
> Lower right-hand corner of page 2 "dictation and correction"
>
> It would be lovely to have full select and say compatibility so I can edit
> without touching the damn keyboard of my broken hands.  I'm even willing to
> commit to building the grammar for driving all of the other features (font
> changing, etc.) using the dragonfly extension to NaturallySpeaking.
>
> I know this is a fairly narrow market but,  disabled users are sweating it
> out with open office and Microsoft Word which are just way too fat and
> clumsy to work with speech recognition properly.
>
> 2) dark writer like functionality.
>
> When I write, I only want to pay attention to what's on the screen.  I don't
> need to see all the other text controls or other things that that nature
> because I'm just writing text.  12 point, Courier, double spaced text.
>  Black background, white text.  Thank you very much.  :-)
>
> 3) dual document presentation.
> When I write, I often create a "slave" document where I put notes, little
> bits of exposition exploring an idea, back story.  Things are not going to
> end up in the final document but I don't want to lose because they were
> research worth spending time on.  So far, nobody does a dual page
> side-by-side slave document feature well except maybe Emacs (C-x3).
>
> 4) marginal notes.
>
> I really really like buzzword marginal notes.  It's so nice to be of the
> comments from people about what needs to be fixed the document without them
> screwing around with my text.  It's hard enough catching all my own grammar
> and speech recognition derived errors.  I don't need to learn how somebody
> else writes and try to integrate that style into my own.
>
> Can you tell I'm a seriously cranky author?  There are two people in this
> world I trust to edit my text.  And one of them is suspect.  it's not unlike
> having someone change your code as you still exploring the problem space.
>
> This would mean you would have three types of access.  Read-only, reviewer,
> and coeditor (terms taken from buzzword).  It means you can read-only or you
> can leave comments or you can change the document.  My experience shows that
> this is very powerful.
>
> 5) platform for publishing
>
> Done right, this can become a platform for also to publishing.  The trick is
> to allow the end user to control authentication on a document.  Why?  Let's
> take a simple example of a blog.  If you have a wrapper program which would
> fetch pages from the collaborative repository, you could turn at the Word
> documents into blog entries.  Readers of the blog could then comment in-line
> rather than stacking up their comments on the bottom where they are
> disassociated from the content.  It wouldn't make sense for everyone to get
> an Abbey word collaborative user ID for a whole bunch of reasons.  A cool
> side effect of this would be that if the blog creator found mistakes, they
> could then modify the document in Abbey word, publish a new version (with
> the old version available as a tab or something) and then preserve
> appropriate comments but delete the ones pointing out the error.  I'm
> probably not expressing it clearly enough but, that's the rough idea.
>
> think be true for online book publishing.  You have a framework which grabs
> pages from the collaborative framework and the book becomes visible in the
> book framework complete with payment systems etc. again, just another idea.
>
> Anyway, I keep watching because it's really interesting what you're doing
> and I'm hoping someone can help me by being a guide to lead me through the
> clueless new user woods of this feature.
>
> --- eric
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Received on Mon Nov 9 01:14:18 2009