I have never ever used anything other that Word to do stuff in the past. D&H was passed between me and Iain with Track Changes turned on and lots of witty Scottish quips added.

The current bits of BtQ that are sitting around are done on Notepad because I can open them easier on my phone and make some notes when I am travelling to work. I have the luxury of not having to explain my layout or whatever to a designer or layout artist as I do them myself.

As for other collaborative tools? The one that I have used more than anything else is .... GTalk, the chat function of Gmail. Debates and discussions about things at ridiculous hours of the morning are stored as emails in the system so I can go back to them later. Invaluable stuff. My main development team, if you could call it that, are my players and we use a lot of messageboard traffic on our private forum.

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

I think you'll find a lot of variation in what software people use. For myself, I pretty much do all of it (except graphics manipulation) in PagePlus, which I know is a bit weird.

PS - you can't really lecture Andy on his English when you're using "y'all" every third word! ;)

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

I tend to write in plain text. I use Textroom, which is handy and free. Once I'm happy with the text enough to send it to someone else to look at, I dump it into Google Docs and do numpty markup. Google Docs saves all the changes in a way you can see, and makes sharing easy, because there's nothing to email except an invite and everyone's working on the same document.

I tend to write in RTF or plain text, and then paste into InDesign and do my styling there.

I have the new version of Creative Suite (ouch! that cost me) and I hope to see what it has in terms of version control and so on.

I really should be more rigourous in terms of managing my versions. The outputs I need are print and (at least one kind of) e-book.

I have GoLive from CS2, but have never used it for version control. I used to use Word with track changes to exchange between editors, but I find GoogleDocs is far more user friendly, not to mention usable. Not sure how that will work when multiple people are working on a project, although me and Malc did experiment once.

(oh, and as for typos, it'll be copy edited, sub-edited, and then proofed before release, so don't worry about them!).

Thanks for the comments guys: interesting to see what 'you all' use.

Haha, good one Tim: the "y'all" that I affect in my post is an in-joke from the Pompey Club, where even though not being American I get ribbed mercilessly for being an American because of my mid-Atlantic accent. I also use shucks, dang, darn, and gee whiz too :)

Andrew, as regards typos: I wasn't making a backhanded remark there, 'cos everyone makes typos. (In a post on the 6B4V thread I describe your game as 'string'. Doh!). As an occasional technical editor I skip over such stuff and leave them to the copy-editor... not fixing every little typo took some getting used to. It's good to read what process you guys have in place there.

Merry Christmas! I hope the New Year brings y'all mucho loot, games, and hot groupies.
Pete

You want to use Version Cue for version control in CS2, not Go Live, as that's a web-editor!
---
Dom Mooney
http://www.bits.org.uk/
http://www.powerprojection.net/

For my BITS scenarios I have generally used either Appleworks (originally), later Word v.X, and exported each version of the draft as PDF for playtest, and as .doc for editing and detailed comments (unless the editor has access to Acrobat or a clone that comments).

Andy tends to use Word or Quark for layout.

Recently, I've been experimenting and switched to Scrivener for writing ( http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html ) with export to RTF or PDF for comments. Layout will be InDesign CS2 (or CS4 if I have to buy the new iMac if the HDD controller has died as it looks).

I have used OpenOffice's .odt format a bit for some Traveller stuff but the track and comment options are a lot weaker than in Word (at least, they are in NeoOffice). I'd rather use Word 2008.

Version control is usually by me retaining control of the master document.
---
Dom Mooney
http://www.bits.org.uk/
http://www.powerprojection.net/

I keep things simple, do all the work in Word which means I can track changes and comments between me and my editor, even if we dip into Open office, which we both do since we have Linux and Windows machines.

As for version control I use a very simple notation.

For example

'Chapter 1 SQ-1.2.5.doc'

Means its chapter one of SimpleQuest, the first version is the number of times my peer review group has reviewed any version of the document, second number is the number of times that the Editor has seen the document and the final number is the number of revisions that I have made to the document. This has been invaluable for keeping track of SimpleQuest which has about 12 chapters and about 200 pages, and three distinct groups of people who feedback into it (me, Graham Spearing my editor and a 'peer review group')

Due to the increasing number of people that are looking and playtesting the the drafts I'm looking at using some form of document repository, although this may be as simple as using attachments on posts on the private development boards of my Forum (d101games.co.uk/forum)

Regards

;O)Newt
D101games -An Imaginary Company