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Ask HN: Revision control for non-hackers

I am project manager for a university textbook project. The book is being written collaboratively, with some authors in the US and others in China. How can I manage the various documents and revisions without using Git, Mercurial, or some such hacker-friendly tool which is most certainly beyond the grasp of the authors? Would a service such as Dropbox work? So far, they have written the book in MS Word format, but I intend to migrate to a TeX-based system for typesetting and layout. Ideally, I'd like to use something like LyX, but online and collaborative. Does such a tool exist?
( 2 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Revision control for non-hackers by Adrenalist on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:15AM (#693325)
You can set up shared folders using Dropbox, but I'm not sure if version control is set up for that (I don't think it is, but couldn't find any information on getdropbox.com)

How about Google Docs? Super easy to use (Just like MS Word, only better!) and has great version control/sharing/collaboration features baked right in.

Re:Ask HN: Revision control for non-hackers by mgunes on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:55AM (#693390)
There's also the option of simply using a wiki. MoinMoin can render pages to the DocBook format, through which you can output to many formats, including TeX.