[Tfug] Collaborative editing environments?

[Claude Rubinson]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 07:28:04PM -0700, Zack Williams wrote:
> > Not feasible.  I can't really force anybody to use anything and my
> > colleagues (academics in the social sciences) need a GUI environment
> > in which they're already comfortable.  If they were willing and able
> > to use Pandoc, we'd already be writing everything in LaTeX.
> 
> And this, my friends, is why Microsoft is still in business.  Better
> solutions passed up because people can't stand not having WYSIWYG,
> even thought it slows them down in the long term.
> 
> There are learning studies out there that demonstrated how an
> interface that required users to learn a few keyboard shortcuts was
> slower for the first half hour, then faster thereafter than a GUI
> environment with identical keyboard options that people didn't have to
> learn.

I don't know about that.  I think that the problem is more general and
more universally human--it's painful to learn a new way of doing
things.  I should probably just bite the bullet and learn how to use
OOo/LibreOffice properly.  If I was willing to do that, the costs of
collaborating with my Word-using colleagues would decrease.  Instead,
I spend too much time trying to find a way to shoehorn word processing
into the Emacs/Unix environment that I'm familiar with.

C.