Re: [O] A book produced using Org

[Vikas Rawal]

> On 20-Sep-2015, at 4:20 am, Pascal Fleury <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Great! Congrats!
> 
> I was actually wondering: you are 3 authors. How did you collaborate, in 
> practice ? There was a thread about using org for collaborative work, but it 
> seemed to end in discussing other tools...
> Was it plain git/emacs and the tools used usually for code management ?


Well, unfortunately, the other two authors are not familiar with emacs, 
org-mode, or LaTeX.

The parts they wrote were sent as MS-Word files. I converted them into Org-mode.

For the parts I wrote, I sent them PDFs. The first time, I also sent them a 
Word version. I offered them that they could comment in word (with track 
changes) and send me, or better still, work on hard copies and send me the 
scans. The PDFs were so far superior to those word files, that could not resist 
them :). So, their comments came as scans of the commented hard copies, and I 
incorporated them in. Once they were comfortable with this, in subsequent 
rounds, I had to send them only PDFs.

We followed the same process with the copy editors. The copy editors worked on 
hard copies, and I incorporated the comments. This actually had a huge 
advantage since, in the process of incorporating their edits, I went through 
every single change they wanted to make. I do not know if they had done this on 
their software, how I would have gone through every sentence to check if and 
what had been modified.

The publisher usually works with InDesign, but was willing to let me deal with 
production of the print-ready PDF if I could meet her specifications. Again, 
this meant additional work for me. But this was also far more efficient than 
converting everything into Word, and then letting her set it up on InDesign. 
Both these steps would have been far more laborious. For example, I doubt if 
InDesign can make an author index automatically from citations in the way 
biblatex does.

So, the barrier in our case was not to find the most appropriate 
version-control software. The problem was that the other two authors were 
completely unfamiliar with any of these tools. But, even with that, using 
Org-mode was so far superior to shifting to Word or anything of that kind. No 
question.

 Vikas