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Personal Hypertext Report #9

Finally, I’ve managed to get the “change_tracking_text_editor_1” capability working reliable enough for beta testing and prepared a downloadable package: hypertext-systems.org/downloads.php. Java 1.6 or higher is required. A description of the tool/capability can be found in this video.

From here, plenty of very interesting options to extend it present themselves, but I find important to point out that in my opinion, tracking the development of a text is fundamental for a hypertext system and serious writing on a computer. Without it, versioning and revision can only be done retrospectively with heuristical diffs as after-the-fact analysis, which can be wrong and lacks information like the order of changes or changes that later got overwritten again. With the text’s history recorded, every individual character as the most atomic element can be addressed with a higher resolution than with indifferent, agnostic diff/patch blocks.

For a hypertext system, one has to ask where the texts it’s supposed to manage come from. If they’re from old sources, only compiled, merged, consolidated versions without record of the history of their writing may be available, but for new texts I write myself today, I don’t want to immitate the old constraints imposed by physical production and instead make full use of the potential of digital. With writing covered for now (although very primitive initially), I can continue with tools/capabilities for resource management, publishing and reading, to eventually arrive at an integrated system for more convenience than using the capabilities individually.

Besides the prototype of a hyperglossary capability (video) and WordPress post retriever (with subsequent conversion to different target formats), the “Change Tracking Text Editor” is the only other contribution I was able to prepare for the 50th anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s Great Demo while loosely participating in the Doug@50 effort during the year 2018.

Related books I’ve read while working on the editor: “Track Changes” by Matthew Kirschenbaum and “The Work of Revision” by Hannah Sullivan.

This text is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License 3 + any later version and/or under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. See the history of how this text developed.

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