For SVN ( which is great great great for revising work — and revising and writing should be kept as separate tasks), I recommend Versions for Mac, Tortoise for PC and Rapid SVN for *nix. They all offer sensible visual interfaces for easily comparing versions of your work through time.

Gotcha. I do have both of those advantages using LaTeX and SVN, though. I can use comments to have hidden versions of sentences. I can describe my versions with the commits. It has its downsides. It’s not WYSIWYG. It’s a bit of a learning curve. It provides a slew of headaches. But once it’s setup, you just write.

http://www.literatureandlatte......vener.html

It’s quite a good example, that lots of other kinds of software should ideally emulate.

I do use Google Docs, btw. And if it were versioning, I’d like features that Google Docs don’t give, such as naming versions so I can remember that that was the one where I tried this, and that one was when I was trying that.

But my real point is that I’d like to see someone design a word processor with an eye to how we actually write.

I’ve been saying that for years. Word processors need versioning, and it would be a very easy thing to build into a program, especially with the advent of open document formats based on XML, and with the proliferation of SQLite being embedded in programs. It seems like

You know, the word processor in the Google Docs suite does pretty much all of what you mentioned, though. It lacks certain bells and whistles that the big boys like Word, Word Perfect, and Mellel have, but it does have versioning that allows you to compare revisions.

Having some programming experience, I use a version control program (SVN) to let me keep versions of my documents, and I am trying to write in LaTeX when I can. With this scheme, I have a really skinny versions of my documents, I can convert them into great looking pdfs, I can maintain versions of the file, and I have lots of copies in lots of places to keep them safe.