[El Gato]

My girlfriend and one of her professors are going to begin work on Geotechnical text book / field manual. She is looking for, preferably, a web-based application where the two of them can collaborate on the layout, and edit content.

This is specifically what she sent to me as her requirements:

I want him to see what a book page would look like (layout, colors, images, overall appearance). He should also be able to see & edit content. He needs to see paragraph breaks, but not necessarily line breaks (since that'll change anyway depending on editor's comments, etc.). At this point we want control over how we can present data to the student, so we'll be working on content but since our layout is an experiment, we need to take the time to pay special attention to this.

The bolded part is the rub. I would suggest keeping the layout and content separate until she's ready to combine them at the end, but they want to see what the final product is going to look like through-out the process so as to see how best to present the information.

I took a look at Google Docs, but there is a 500 kb file size limit and its support for complex layouts is lacking. There's 'track changes' in Word, but setting up any kind of layout and keeping it consistent across large documents can be a major pain in the ass.

So, do you guys have any suggestions on applications for manuscript writing (Mac or Win) that allows for online collaboration or some other web-based solution?

Thanks!

[Mithras]

Latex + svn, but I suppose that's several orders of magnitude too geeky.

[El Gato]

Not at all too geeky. I don't think she's used Latex before, but being that she's working on a technical book, I'm going to suggest that she look into it (she's an engineer, I'm sure she can figure it out). Otherwise, I'm not sure what she's planning on using for writing the actual content.

Thanks for reminding me about Subversion!... and what do you know? Our Dreamhost account has Subversion available.

Great suggestions, Mithras!