How do you work with external reviewers / copy editors?

[the-solipsist]

Description

I hope this question is okay in this forum. This is not really a question about Quarto, but rather about Quarto-linked workflows.

If you're working with external reviewers or copy editors, what does your work flow look like? Do you write in Markdown, convert to DOCX, get comments and corrections in tracked change mode, and then manually make all the corrections in your own QMD file? I can imagine that working with reviewers who are just leaving comments, but even with copy editors who are making hundreds of little changes?

Or is there a way of incorporating tracked changes from Word into Markdown? (I know of pandoc --track-changes=all, but that doesn't fit well into my workflow.)

Or have you managed to find copy editors who are willing to directly edit QMD files?

And do you at all use any online platforms for collaborative editing? Are there any that support QMD well (along with CSL YAML bibliography files)?

I've been struggling with this, so any pointers would be welcome!

[cscheid]

Thanks for asking that question - this is definitely in-scope for the forum! I don't have any direct answers, but I want to share a bit of perspective and ongoing work.

Do you write in Markdown, convert to DOCX, get comments and corrections in tracked change mode, and then manually make all the corrections in your own QMD file?

There is a project currently under way to make the "qmd-docx-track-changes workflow" cleaner. Noam Ross, who is original author of redoc, is currently in the early stages of working towards making redoc work with Quarto. We (the Quarto team) are not directly involved with the effort, but are very supportive of it and have met with Noam to figure out ways to make it easy for him to do it.

More generally, this sort of workflow is something we want Quarto to support well. One feature we're planning on adding to Quarto, relatively soon, is direct support for editorial marks. Although there are similar efforts like CriticMarkup, we are going to provide our own syntax. The plan is for our tooling (VS code extension, visual editor + RStudio integration, etc) to incorporate this syntax directly. We will start by making this novel syntax opt-in, but the hope is that it will make it at least a bit easier for editors to work on.

In other words, we hear you and we're actively working on this. We don't have anything ready to share with you just now, but we'll start being able to share some more updates soon.

[the-solipsist]

Thanks for your useful comments. I found the bit about incorporating CriticMarkup-like editorial marks interesting. In the past, the difficulty I faced was in having a good UI/UX for CriticMarkup. I guess that could be rolled into the VSCode Quarto extension / Positron.

One slight concern about the proposed format for editorial marks: Here is some highlighted content [!! that I want [surely not ambiguous] or is it?] Without some closing syntax (like CriticMarkup has), it'd be difficult to handle brackets within brackets. In the alternative, an order of precedence would need to be set: e.g., ] closes the furthest open [ .

Also, if you're open to suggestions, jgm's djot uses this syntax: {=highlighting=}, {+insert+}, and {-delete-}.

[cscheid]

Also, if you're open to suggestions, jgm's djot uses this syntax: {=highlighting=}, {+insert+}, and {-delete-}.

Frankly speaking, I think that syntax is a mistake; {} is used everywhere else to denote attributes, but then in editorial marks it's used to denote markdown content.

Consider: [spans]{#id}, [links](./target), ![image description in _markdown_](./image.png){.class}, but then {+insert+}? That's incongruous.

[!! that I want [surely not ambiguous] or is it?]

It's not ambiguous, as you can verify with the quarto-markdown-pandoc crate at https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-markdown:

$ echo '[!! that I want [surely not ambiguous]{#surely} or is it?]' | cargo run --bin quarto-markdown-pandoc
    Finished `dev` profile [optimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 12.20s
     Running `/Users/cscheid/repos/github/cscheid/kyoto/target/debug/quarto-markdown-pandoc`
[ Para [Span ( "" , ["quarto-highlight"] , [] ) [Str "that", Space, Str "I", Space, Str "want", Space, Span ( "surely" , [] , [] ) [Str "surely", Space, Str "not", Space, Str "ambiguous"], Space, Str "or", Space, Str "is", Space, Str "it?"]] ]

I'm not trying to be dismissive in the following comment, but rather I want to allay concerns: we literally put in a combined 6 months of work into the design of the parser and syntax. I can't promise that we got everything right, but I promise you it's quite good.