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Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting but I’m curious, how much use would something like this get?

Forget a paid product or any sort of licensing requirements:

If someone were to create a DocHub that treated docx files like txt files and had a plugin for word/OpenOffice used a really nice interface on top of git and came up with a way to intelligently represent styling changes (which git doesn’t because it only deals in txt.)

Would this sorta tool get enough use to justify maintenance? This feels like a niche within a niche.

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If this service were easily self-hosted (i.e. on an intranet), it would serve the niche of people who for whatever reason cannot or will not use Google Docs, whose collaborative editing and version control experience is state-of-the-art, and unlikely to be surpassed by a competitor.

This could be a small but very stable niche—many companies that deal with sensitive data cannot use cloud services, often by law.

I have a hard time with the Google docs is the "collaborative editing and versioning" state of the art bit. My team has several long running docs that we maintain in it, and the UX for finding relevant comments around a blurb of text is bad. You can either (a) never resolve comments so that they always appear in the sidebar, cluttering the doc to no end or (b) tap the comment icon in the top right and scroll through resolved comments that have lost all relationship to the text body. I think there must be better solutions, but vendor lock-in means we'll probably never leave it (at least, not without major disruption).

My question is: "state of the art" for which purpose? For general collaboration I think GDoc is very good.

I'm going for a very specific purpose: enabling a teacher to walk a student through a sequence of narrated edits. The GitHub-based method I showed has proven to work in practice, but GitHub is a high bar for many. While GDoc doesn't solve the problem out of the box, I can definitely imagine a scripted solution that would, and I'd like to see that happen.

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