: Re: How do you track dependencies for your co-authors? I and one or more co-authors, sometimes geographically distributed, are working on a set of related documents. Sometimes I will make a change

@Frith254

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You can work together at the same document with tools like Google docs, but that maybe gets a little bit messy over time if you want to track all the changes.

To make the changes visible (I'm not sure if that's what you mean with "dependencies", but I guess so) my best bet is a source control system like programmers are using it. But to make use of its benefits, you should store your work in a comparable format.

What does that mean: Tools like Subversion or Git store your document in a (central) database. Everyone needs access to this database (the access is provided by the source control tools). If someone changes something, then the change is stored (tagged with his name) to the database/source control system. It also can be commented.

If the document format is human readable (like txt or xml), then a diff-program (which shows the differences between two files) can show the changes between the different versions of the file. I know that Subversion can also do this with the Word doc-format (which is a binary format, i.e. not human readable).

So the changes are directly visible. Additional information (why you made the change, for example) go into the comment.

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