This comes up often when blogging: Do we use Word files with their awesome change tracking features and then deal with all the garbage they produce before posting (possibly introducing errors)? Or do we work in plain text from the start, cobbling together some sort of change system like the one Michael suggests? (If there is one, I'd love to know about it!) I suspect there are many, many such systems that have been cobbled together by individuals, however. Unfortunately, outside of the programming realm, there's no system for tracking changes at the character level that I'm aware of. And for writing, there's likely no need to deal with the more complex issues such as branching/merging and such a linear history will likely work well enough. It may take a little getting used to for someone who isn't technically inclined, but if you are serious about doing this with only plain text files, it's a reasonably easy way forward once you get over the initial learning curve. Source control systems tend to be somewhat more geared toward programmers, but they solve your problem quite nicely: they allow multiple persons to work on a single text file (even simultaneously), tracking changes over time, displaying the differences between arbitrary versions, going back and forward between versions, and selectively rolling back any changes made. That said, depending on the technical inclination of the author(s) and editor(s), you might get away with something like setting up a GitHub account and uploading the text file there. ![]() Something like this: Tracked changes look like #this#. In any case, it would have to be an agreement between the people involved which marker(s) to use and what they mean. You might get away with using some marker that isn't used anywhere else, like #, to indicate a changed passage, but I'm not sure if that really qualifies as markup. ![]() I kind of doubt that there is a standard for it, at least.
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