writing together – collaborative editing is easy

→ comment to The next wave in scholarly word processors?

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/
• http://www.lyx.org/

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 Markdown with Markdown to LaTeX:

• http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
• http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ or
• http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/

Maybe with markdownify for pages which already are HTML:

• http://milianw.de/projects/markdownify/

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