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Re: facilities to comment documents


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Alvaro Tejero Cantero <address@hidden>
  • To: Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden>
  • Cc: texmacs-users <address@hidden>
  • Subject: Re: facilities to comment documents
  • Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2020 11:09:16 +0100
Dear Massi,

I quite like these days' standard way to manage comments (main word processors, think e.g. Google docs). Comment threads are attached to ranges of text*. Each comment consists of a timestamp, an author string and a body string. Individual comments can be edited and deleted by their authors. There's a subtle icon/indication outside of the document, generally on the right side showing how many comments have been made at a given spot.

The comment thread can be expanded to become visible out-of-band (i.e. not in the typeset area). It is then anchored to the commented text via a subtle diagonal line. When the user scrolls the commented text out of view, if the comment thread is selected, it keeps still visible, with the line pointing in the direction of the commented text.

In my opinion, the following features are important:
* the comments live outside the typeset area and don't cause the document to be re-typeset when edited, nor do they increase whitespace when collapsed, etc.
* the comments don't live in a freely-floating window (otherwise it's hard to know what they connect to). Maybe this can be alleviated with a 'focus on target' button in the GUI if indeed a floating dialog turns out to be the practical implementation.
* comment threads are linked to ranges of text and can be made to show/hide on an individual basis (e.g. via context menu or shortcut)

The keep-in-view-while-scrolling feature and managing the vertical space for the notes are both in my view secondary aspects of the feature.

While somebody may argue that part of this behaviour could be had with margin notes, in my experience they are somewhat brittle, and the influence of out-of-band content on the document typesetting is undesirable, for example if the user has to enlarge margins to make notes fit.

I know some aspects of the feature will be trivial to implement and others extremely costly; here I was focused on describing the functionalities I find valuable as a comment writer and reader.

I find this discussion quite valuable, since, as I said in another thread, I believe that editor choice these days is increasingly dominated by its affordances for collaboration. Numerous users end up using comparatively primitive editors that allow them to collaborate more easily**, which is a pity for TeXmacs (-> minimum common denominator).

Álvaro.
* One could work here with more semantic units in TeXmacs. What I think is not possible in TeXmacs is to apply some transformation to text that is distributed across paragraphs, so the maximum unit would be then the paragraph, which is OK for me.
** The spectrum of collaboration-friendly features is large - from working well with line-oriented revision-control systems, through structured diffs (check), to comment management (this thread) all the way to realtime sync with simultaneous cursors.

On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 08:08, Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden> wrote:
Dear all,
 discussing with some friends I became aware of some advantage of unstructured editing for which we should provide some alternative. This is the possibility (common in programming, but also in some research workflow) to add comments on a document which will not appear in the final version (i.e. in the PDF, on in the HTML or LaTeX export -- In some sense, the dual of literate programming, maybe we can call it co-literate editing :)).

These comments can be parts of the document one do not want to make to the final version, or just reminders to explore some directions, or parts one has to cut because of editorial constraints or referees comments, but anyway one wants to keep in place and not just delete them (because maybe the paper has a short and long versions). These comments can also be simply discussion between various co-authors, so it would be nice if they carry tags, like the name of the author. And then have a macro facility to view only certain subclasses of comments and make them invisible (i.e. just leave a flag or some other indicator which do not modify the typesetting) if the user wants. This should not be difficult to code, is something similar to the versioning markup we already have, but I think it would be a useful addition to everyday workflows.
It could also be a way to edit the metadata in the document.

Of course one has (at least) two options to design such a facility: make the additional content editable as part of the document (as in the proposal above), or keep it in the document as always invisible and make it editable only via some separate GUI element, i.e. a dialog with an embedded editor (like we have now for search and replace, for example, or for the macro editor). I think I would prefer the first approach, though.

Thoughts, ideas, comments, on such a facility?

Max

ps: on a similar direction a document can have a "draft" mode where markups like \todo or these comments are visible and a "final" mode, where they are invisible.


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