I am not sure exactly what your question is, but I will attempt a reply anyway.
First, I think you are confused a little with some concepts. A text editor is for typing text. It does not directly give you formatting. The resulting product is simply a text file. MS Word or OpenOffice on the other hand is a word processor, it can add formatting, tables, etc. The problem with sharing them is actually in the format used, usually each program has their own format. OpenOffice has helped by using the standardized XML format. Wiki's and other structured text systems such as LaTeX are another different thing. Word processor files contain all the formatting hard coded into them, like a binary file. However, for structured text (wikis) the files are actually text files with the formatting indictated, like computer code. The underlying wiki software then turns that code into what you see in your browser (it slightly more complicated, but I won't go into detail). Yes, wikis are not WYSIWYG, but they are simply text formats, not locked in formats. But there is being developed WYSIWYG editor for wikis right here on WE, it is being tested on our test site. If you understand wiki syntax, then you can actually work on stuff offline. It is what I normally do as I do not have a permanent internet connection. I write my stuff offline in a text editor using wiki syntax and then paste it on to the web when I am connected. Again this is because the wiki page is simply a text file. (See here for my guide http://www.wikieducator.org/Help:Editing_using_a_text_editor) I am not sure what you mean by rich formatting. Most of the formatting problem I think you are refering to is a limitation on html not in the wiki. And as most professional designers will tell you what looks good on a screen is not what looks good when printed and vice versa. (As the scribus website http://www.scribus.net says "Graphics used on a website are almost always unusable for commercial printing".) Hope this helps. John http://www.wikieducator.org/User:JohnWS http://johnsearth.blogspot.com ________________________________ From: 2web3 <sergiu.r...@gmail.com> To: WikiEducator <wikieducator@googlegroups.com> Sent: Sat, November 21, 2009 1:36:16 PM Subject: [WikiEducator] Collaborative Document sharing I have a somewhat generic question related to editors in general. I feel this discomfort with current state of document creation. Let me explain. In the beginning there were just simple text editors. Then they got more sophisticated, visual, WYSIWYG, culminating with products such as MS Word and alike. This is all great, but the document is stored in individual files (silos) and is hard to share and collaborate with a team. Of course, you can send via e-mail, but then the proliferation of versions and comments makes this kind of collaboration difficult. Then came centralized systems such as SharePoint that allow to store the documents in one place, lock the document so that only one person can edit it. However this again is far from perfect: I cannot easily track the history, who did what, what has really changed. And I still cannot properly comment on the document. But is better than e-mail. Then wikis came along. They made a whole bunch of stuff easy (versioning with diff, easy access to information, search, permissions etc). But they lack several important features a modern editor has: * They are not truly WYSIWYG. Any wiki is light-years behind Word from editing capabilities. This is a major impediment why wikis are not widely used in our organization. * They are not easy to work with in offline mode (when traveling on a plane) * They generally rapidly degrade in performance as more users use a wiki installation * It is not easy to just send a wiki "document" to somebody, especially to an external partner, when the wiki is on intranet. It has to be opened to external users, security policies need to be put in place etc. E-Mail is just light years easier in this respect. * Wikis, being web application, poorly support rich formatting that we've come to expect from a Word doc. I cannot easily take a wiki "document", print to PDF and send it to external partner - usually the document will not look professional. And to make it look professional in wiki will take way more time and resources than just to write it from scratch in Word. So here's my dilemma... Can anybody help me point out to a solution? Or if you experience the same issue - share your feelings as well, let me know that I'm not suffering alone. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
