These include, if I am not mistaken: Open Office, Apple Pages, and… newer versions of Word? And of course LaTeX.

Then the question becomes, which ones write their data in a way that is sensible enough for the diffs to be meaningful.

Further examination might reveal that you can achieve useful diffs using some relatively simple processing scripts. For example, maybe one of the formats has a bunch of proprietary tags for all kinds of formatting and meta information that you don’t care about diffing, but it also has a clear place where it puts the “real content”… so you can parse the xml tree, strip out all the <content> tags, and then diff that content.

The answer is yes and no. In terms of conclusions, I’ve found that there probably isn’t a single system that supports what I want. I.e. no great integrated system. Word is likely quite robust (esp newer versions, I’m still on Word X), but getting my stuff from Word into a SVN-like flow would require hand-copying and pasting or something like that. Which may end up being the solution.

I’ve also found that citation manager integration seems to trump all. I use BibDesk, which integrates perfectly with TeXShop, but does not integrate with Word. This is likely the largest decision factor…Its hard enough to manage 20-40 references for a manuscript, but no way am I going to try to juggle the 200-300 I’ll use on my thesis.

So what I think will happen is that I’ll do basic drafting in Word, but the majority of my work will be done in TexShop, which will integrate perfectly with SVN and Bibdesk. I need to spend a few hours better understanding classes and latex markup, but once I get over that hurdle I imagine it won’t feel much different than coding html or something like that.

- Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread.

I use it for all my online writing now. In fact, all my writing. But, I’m not writing a dissertation and our use cases are probably very different. Nonetheless, it’s a very sweet tool for getting lots of text onto a page really easily and being able to revert versions simply.

Good luck!

I too am a software developer so I approach very similar.

Everything starts in Google Notebook, because I can harvest from a web page or blog with just a right click and it keeps the reference to the original piece. I can also just capture my own thoughts as I am surfing using my firefox add-in as well.

I can then organize these “notes” into notebooks by relevancy. I can further refine and handle the evolution by scripts using the Google Notebook API.

Then as information and throughts mature I migrate to Google Docs with a simple right click in Google Notebook.

Once in Google Docs I can refine more formally and with the assistance of others if necessary through collaboration.

Then I can also organize data in spreadsheets and evolve aspects into presentations.

From there I can publish to blogger, PDF, a book or whatever publishing format I wish.

I like the Google Platform because of how the applications compliment and work together, however the API is the biggest piece that allows me to work with things programmatically using scripts.

I couldn’t succeed doing it on the screen…

You can see the results here:
http://flickr.com/photos/10176016@N03/2046784747/

Sorry Fred ;)