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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

There must be a better tool for professional writers than Google Docs?!

Just finished publishing a 600+ page book for a writer.

The collaboration features of Google Docs streamline work with a proofreader and editor better than anything else I’ve seen.

Author writes, editor / proofreader suggest changes, author approves.

All updates tracked and fairly easy to revert.

After editing, docs are exported to rtf and placed in indesign.

Google docs are intuitive and easier to use than ms word. No more sending files back and forth.

Haven’t seen a better process yet. Some editors still request a printed manuscript for them to put hand-written notes on ;)

That makes sense, however, that's already the final stages of the product. I have my doubts that Google Docs is the best choice for the creation of the first draft, though. Once you have that, everything that comes after that is surely in good hands with a traditional word processor, and as you point out, the strength of Google Docs over Word etc. lies in its collaborative abilities.

I’m not a professional, but I find Scrivener [1] invaluable. Having 600 pages of unstructured, unorganized text would be a nightmare for me.

[1] https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

I used Scrivener to write my two books:

https://jondouglas.dev/enough & https://jondouglas.dev/ptp

Scrivener is not so great for collaborating though. Nobody on Reedsy seemed to know about the tool from the editor perspective and all asked for Word/Google Docs/Pdf.

I am not a professional writer, but among the paid tools I have used in the past, I find Scrivener to be pretty nice in helping me organize views. I however find its LaTeX support not very satisfactory, but probably that is not their main target market.

For me, it's vim editing latex files, with git for version control. Others might choose emacs as an editor, but the other decisions are pretty common in my field (physical science).

You haven't switched to Overleaf for collaborative editing yet?

Overleaf is not really suited for non-technical people, it's not even suited for technical people that are unfamiliar with latex. They could make it much better if you could annotate on the pdf instead for non-technical people and that these annotations (and or changes) get translated to the latex files so the author sees them in the right place as well.

Grandparent is a scientist who's familiar with latex.

Oh! Then he should give Overleaf a try. Be sure to split up the files so you're not working in the same document at the exact same time, this is sometimes problematic when pressing compile.

Working on this over at pagespace.app, looking for cofounders if anyone is interested! Notion-like writing experience is the goal with the ability to sell via subscription or per unit.

I don't think the final edition is going to be made by going to Export To PDF in Google Docs. He seems to be mostly using it as a paste dump, then refining it into chapters, dumping it down, formatting slowly. For that, Google Docs really seems as good as any, no?

I don't know. Google Docs is a linear tool for linear text, mostly. But the process you describe is anything but linear - it resembles a slow conversion from an unstructured mess to a final text. Intuitively, there seems to be a mismatch between that process and a classic word processor.

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