writing together – collaborative editing is easy

→ comment to The next wave in scholarly word processors? [1]

What I’d like to see is more people using version tracking systems.

With these you have a discussion which can be merged easily when it gets branched. I use it for anything I do, and I could use it together with an only-windows-and-GUI user with ease, installing TortoiseHG for both and Lyx for him (LaTeX made easy – you don’t have to see the sources).

• http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/ [2]
• http://www.lyx.org/ [3]

Just right click in a folder, call synchronize and pull and your work gets merged.

For publishing to the web and to PDF I’d use Emacs org-mode or Markdown with Markdown to LaTeX:

• org-mode: orgmode.org [4]

• markdown: daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ [5]

• convert: pandoc [6] or multimarkdown [7]

Maybe with markdownify for pages which already are HTML:

• http://milianw.de/projects/markdownify/ [8]

Besides: A simple Mercurial [9] repository with URLs as document identifiers would allow forking the web :)