collaborative-writing
Example collaborative document for a friend. Organized by chapter.
Each file is written in Markdown. If you click on a file, it appears as a compiled HTML document. Select 'Raw' in the upper right corner to view the raw Markdown text. See this link for detail on editing files via the website.
For submission or distribution, each Markdown file can be converted to a separate Word document using a tool called Pandoc. Additional tools can compile all documents into a single Word document.
Collaborators need to set up Github accounts to participate. The project (i.e. repository) owner can then add these accounts as collaborators on the project.
- Editing can be done on the website.
- Each change is saved by 'committing' the change.
- When editing on the Github website, there is a box below the edited document titled "Commit changes".
- The user/editor adds a brief message about what was changed or added to the current file then presses the green "Commit changes" button to save the changes.
Markdown has a quick learning curve, but is really intended for webpages. If you need to create draft Word documents or PDFs before the final product, it would be best to rely on markdown's formatting. Then for the final document, you may need to manually edit the formatting in Word or another format that allows more powerful typesetting.