Version Control with Google Docs Best Practices? [closed] - version-control

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From a quick perusal, it seems that Google Docs does not support version control the way git or svn does. My question is:
If I want to store all my documents on Google Docs, what is the best way to make them be capable of branch/merge type version control? What would this require?
Or what is the workflow you use to store your families/companies documents on Google Docs and sync them with git/svn so multiple people can be editing a document concurrently and they won't overwrite changes?

You can try to write an application to do that. Read some google docs protocol documentation, specially Document Revisions section. Be aware though that this is going to be a lot of work: you would need an application that compares all the data from your revisions in google docs to your git/svn ones and vice versa.
Seriously, having already a SCM configuration, I would stick to it, and do a simple python script that would "export" the last docs commits (or tags) to my google docs. This way you can read your documentation anywhere (you just need a browser) but still having the benefits of a traditional SCM, being this a best-of-both-worlds approach IMHO.

I am not sure about google docs... but have you looked at dropbox? I have used that on a couple small to medium sized projects and it worked well.

Use Google Code. Google Docs is rather rudimentary. It doesn't have Word's versioning features. You can save many revisions however.

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What online tool do you use to automate translation of .arb files? [closed]

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Do you know any good tools to support the translation of .arb files?
It's a standard for Flutter and since Google Translator Toolkit will be sunset soon (https://support.google.com/translatortoolkit/answer/9462068) we're searching for a good solution to translate/gather our translations
Edit (June 2020): There's great new open source project called Arbify. This is a self-hosted tool to manage multiple translation projects focused on Flutter. You can edit arb files and fetch them via Dart package tool.
Aside from that some services like POEditor have announced basic support for ARB too.
At the moment the best support for arb files is on Localizely. However, this is a paid service and has strict limits on a free version. It allows to export arb translation files with plurals and placeholder support. It doesn't support genders, though.
There is also one simple web editor and one desktop editor (Babel) that support arb files.
Crowdin supports .arb:
https://support.crowdin.com/supported-formats/
It is also able to pull the data from a Git repo and send Pull Requests on GitHub.
However, when I used it in 2018 there was a problem of ##last_modified attribute being updated without any other changes to the translation files, causing lots of churn in PRs. By that time, they were reluctant to improve the situation (based on email conversation with their support), so we resorted to manual edits.
https://localise.biz/ allows 2000 translations. Which I assume are 1000 strings in 2 languages or ~666 strings in 3 languages and so on. Which is more than https://localizely.com/ 150 strings

Using github to write a book [closed]

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With Github one can write a well-formatted README.md file and document to present the project. Also, there are wiki pages for user to collaborate. I'm wandering what would be an optimal workflow, even for non tech users, to make use of the GitHub platform to write a collaborative book.
How to use markdown but then enhance it by applying a stylesheet, make PDF out of it, organise chapters, have a public site (gh-pages) out of it and so on? Is there such a project or tool chain for GitHub?
In other word, how to easily write a collaborative book with a nice html and PDF output in GitHub? Thanks.
Edit: GitBook has changed significantly since I first wrote this answer. PDF support has been dropped, and the CLI toolchain has been abandoned in favour of a proprietary service:
As the efforts of the GitBook team are focused on the GitBook.com platform, the CLI is no longer under active development.
In mid-2019 mdBook is a good option, though it doesn't natively support PDF. If you have Rust and Cargo installed you can simply
cargo install mdbook
to get started.
Original answer:
This is exactly what GitBook is designed for:
GitBook is a command line tool (and Node.js library) for building beautiful books using GitHub/Git and Markdown (or AsciiDoc).
It supports PDF output out of the box, as well as online publishing on its own web platform.

Can GitHub be used for writing a collaborative article? [closed]

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I am contemplating writing a useful article in a field of my interest. There are many others (about 10-15) people interested in peer reviewing and collaborating on the same. I am not a prolific programmer, but I understand how GitHub works for version control.
Can I use it for writing a 4-5 page collaborative article (version control is very important part) or do you think a better alternative exists?
You certainly could, but I don't know if it's the best choice. A couple of questions come to mind. Is this a text-based document format or are you planning on doing your writing in something like MS Word? If the former then I think it could work well. If the latter I would say it may be less effective.
What about your other collaborators? Are they savvy enough to use a DVCS? That would have some influence as well. I don't know how strongly you need the document versioned, but I could see using git as overkill.
I've found that using Google Docs works well and has a revision history, although it's obviously not as robust as would be found in a VCS.
I think it would work great. The Ruby on Rails guides are on a publicly write/readable repository at GitHub, for instance. You get get Git things for free (branches, blame, general version control features), plus you'll have a reliable backup and publishing mechanism if you like.
Given that the contributers are computer literate enough to successfully use Git, that is.
If you write it in Markdown, you can throw inline HTML into it (just by itself like you can do on Stack Overflow). Easy to write, easy to style, etc.
You can, but on the other hand:
Most wikis allow rich-content pages easyly, are ready for collaborative editing and have versioning and version-management embedded in the core.
One promissing recent development is penflip (https://www.penflip.com/) which was created with the idea of being a "github for text".
Check this article to learn about the author's ideas http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers
Consider using google docs. They have some kind of version control. And it is much more suitable for this kind of work.

Simple web-based version control [closed]

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I need a simple, web-based version control tool. 'Version Control' probably implies a lot of functionality I don't need such as diff and merge.
Basically, I have a lot of non-programmer types working on binary files (think Photoshop PSDs), and I would just like a way to check them out and in, and keep previous versions.
Web-based would be ideal, I just want something better than nested folders on a shared drive.
Suggestions?
You could try asvcs: it's web-based and very simple. My advice would be to try one of the known solutions (svn, git, mercurial, even bazaar) and use only the features you need.
Dropbox provides a web interface and can be used as a simple version control system.
Try building something around git. (Or maybe set up a private github account.)
Springloops has what you're looking for. However, it's a paid service. Integrates nicely with Basecamp
You could also use Dropbox. There's version control of sorts. But history is kept only for 1 month.
And there's github
I know through experience that Atlassian's Confluence wiki solution will do versioning for binary uploads. I'm sure there are probably other open source alternatives available as well.

Versioning library like SQLite database library? [closed]

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I like how SQLite library can be included into an application and the application has a full-fledged database to use.
Similarly, is there an open source versioning library that I can include into my application so that I can save versions of files as well as do diffs and merges?
SVN doesn't require any prerequisites on end user machine. You can embed SVN right into you app. To learn more on subversion integration, visit "Application Integration/Embedding" thread on SVN forum.
Answering my question myself, I recently discovered hgshelve and gitshelve that is almost exactly what I was looking for.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by "included in an application", as you could potentially deliver any library so long as the licensing allows. Are you referring to the fact that sqlite is small or that it is public domain?
Mercurial is a similarly lightweight piece of revision control software. If you are writing your application in python, which is likely since python now includes sqlite3, importing features directly from mercurial's source code should not be too difficult. Otherwise there's no shame in invoking commandline processes, though this may be clunkier. Mercurial is not public domain, but it is GPL'd.
Mercurial is also my personal favorite among modern revision control systems. It's leaps ahead of CVS and Subversion, and very similar to GIT although somewhat simpler to use.
You might want to look at fossil, an scm tool written by the author of sqlite. I don't know how easy it is to embed, but it is a single file executable so it should be quite easy to run from within your application.
Arguably, running it as a seperate process might actually be better than embedding since it won't slow down your app while it does what it does.
In my opinion Firebird is one of the best choices for embedded DB scenarios.
Also Microsoft SQL Server Compact (closed source, but free) might be suitable, however it less capable than Firebird.
EDIT:
I misread you question. If you don't need RDBMS, you can try to embed SVN to your application.