tracking changes

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johanneswilm

Hey,
I have been working on tracking changes over the past few months. The basics are ready - tracking changed inline content, removed items like figures or tables and various user requested changes to lists. There are still some things missing though, like the tracking of formatting changes and headlines turned from level 2 to 3, etc. .

I've studied LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word and come to the conclusion that these also just offer tracking up to a certain degree. And the most important are changes to texts. Changes to a lot of formatting is simply not tracked. In the continuum between tracking everything perfectly and on the other hand making a user interface useful to the end user, we will probably end up with something just a little bit closer to perfect tracking than LibreOffice Writer, but I don't think there will be perfect tracking anytime soon. But I'd be interested in opinions on this.

johanneswilm

There is now a temporary server set up at https://staging.fiduswriter.org (login: testtest pw: testtest) to test the current state of the track changes feature. Tracking changes is a major new feature that is not easily done, so it will likely take quite a while before it stabilizes. Please do not put any valuable documents on this server! There is no backup and all information on the server will be deleted periodically.

I am interested in whether this is the kind of tracked changes you would be interested in. They work fairly similar to how tracked changes work in popular word processors. It is both possible to turn on tracked changes for the entire document and to only give the right to do make editions to the document that are tracked.

The staging server is running on a Hetzner-owned server in Nürnberg, Germany.

juca

Hey!

Maybe just too late and eventually a bit not constructive but:
I don't know how are the documents stored, but if they are stored as files, would it not make more sense to integrate a version managing system like GIT into fidus?
Git has been widely widely tested and does make an awesome job with change tracking.
my two cents!

johanneswilm

Hey juca I have noted that interacting with git has been requested bu others as well (see for example https://forum.fiduswriter.org/d/2-priorities-for-fidus-writer-3-4/14 ). Exporting to git in a specific flatfile format that works well with git may be a good idea. But it's not quite the same as tracked changes -- tracked changes also need to work when several users are in the document at the same time, so individual "commits" are then just a single letter being added or removed -- or formatting changing. That doesn't work well with any known graphic git interface and would be a nightmare to handle also for CLI git - a text of 10000 characters would have at least 10000 commits -- possible many more.

At any rate -- the tracked changes feature has now been programmed. I have received some feedback on minor improvements and I will try to implement these before the next version of Fidus Writer is being released.

juca

great looking forward to testing the new function!

Tobias333

Just adding here although the thread is a little old: I've been trying out whether I can use Fidus Writer to work on a text with my assistant, and so far, I am impressed. Thanks for your work on it. With regard to the tracking changes feature: It is very useful for us as is. The main problem we have is that, because of the changing format of the bubble if a tracked change is selected, the entire text is reflowed. With a long text, that takes endless in our browsers and is a pain in the butt. It also leads to the cursor jumping to random places. If I hide the bubbles, it is much better, but I cannot reject or accept the changes.
Therefore, I would either like to have bubbles that do not trigger any motion, or keyboard shortcuts for rejecting and accepting changes.
Sorry if this is old stuff. I am talking about version 3.5 I think, run in a Docker container on my server.

johanneswilm

@tobias333 It would be very helpful if you could provide me with a sample text where this is a problem. Just email it to johannes at fiduswriter dot org.

Tobias333

I'd prefer not to. It's chapters of a book we're publishing (~10,000 words for the chapter). I'm pretty sure it's not about the text, but about the changing width of the columns where the "comments" and "track changes" bubbles appear (Firefox and Chrome on Linux/Gnome). Also, the highlighting of the bubble takes quite long if I jump directly from one tracked change to another. I don't seem to have latency problems or annoying delays if I hide the "comments" and "track changes" bubbles.
All of this may be about my particular setup. I have grabbed the docker file from the installation instructions page.

johanneswilm

It's a problem I have not encountered in any of my tests so I don't think I can do without a sample text. You can also make a new text that shows the same problem. I can sign a statement that I won't spread the text if that helps. Also it would be of interest what browser and version of browser and OS you are running and how old the computer is.

Tobias333

I think this is better shown with a screencast. I'm sending it to your email, along with the text from the cast. New computer with Fedora 29 and Firefox 65