Proseline – Git for prose, in the browser

Comments and edits are complex in Word. There's no clear way to do the starting point - comment - edit - resolution flow that we're familiar with as pull requests or traditional document turns. Track Changes works as intended, but creates complex mismatches between the state of a document and the state of a document to which a comment referred. Versioning is difficult. Almost everyone does it with multiple copies. Clean and redline copies. And so on.

I prepare and negotiate legal documents every day. That practice is almost entirely Word based. Most tech-savvy practitioners have a brief spree with features they discover and master---automatic numbering, cross-references, style separators, tables of contents, and so on. In time, we tend to work back to a lowest common denominator, for simplicity and ease of collaboration. The best way to prepare a transaction document is often to treat Word as much like a typewriter as possible. As a rule of thumb, if you can't safely export to RTF, someone will mangle your document at some point. It may be you.

My first commits on this project were in November of last year, and I only really started developing it actively last month. I didn't post here on HN, and I think that's premature.

To fill in with a hint that the UI itself should provide: There's no such thing as changing text of a draft in Proseline. Rather, you can create a new draft based on an old one, edit, and save. The relevant "Start a new draft based on this one." button is buried a bit at the bottom of draft pages right now.