Collaborative Writing – setup suggestion

Scrivener
1

Hi,

I would like to ask, whether any of you can share some tips on collaborative writing with Scrivener. Situation:

  • two people, might be more in the future
  • one is on Mac/OS X the other is on PC/MS Windows
  • one is technically skilled (me, on OSX) the other does not want to bother with more complicated procedure than installing an app (Scrivener) with simple configuration. He might perhaps set up some cloud file storage, but that is the most complicated thing that we might require at this moment.
  • both might share text snippets, research documents, images
  • both might edit the same file and it is hard to explicitly communicate and agree beforehand who is going to work on which file, therefore there might be edits at different ends of a file or even conflicts in the same file that might have to be merged
  • see mutual changes to the files
  • be able to add comments to each others additions

My questions are: how to set-up this collaborative environment? What is the best practice for such situation? Which services and, most importantly, how to use them? How to configure the two Scrivener installations? What are the limitations of such environment?

Cheers,

Stefan

2

Hi Stefan,

I have been doing just that for a while with a friend in China. I’m on Mac, she’s on Windows. So as not to have to retype the whole thing, can I point you to:

https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/1-master-file-two-writers-collaborating-any-ideas/27409/1

where I answer the same question from another Scrivener user. Other people post in that thread too so my answer is not one of the first. At the end it moves on to other questions … as is typical on these forums.

The only thing to add is that Ioa (Amber V) and I discovered recently that the coding problem between Chinese and English seems to have resolved itself, so I presume that other non-ASCII/ANSI characters provided by UTF-8, like baseline quote marks, ß, and umlauts, should now work properly across the different platforms — though I have no definite knowledge of that.

Good luck.

Mr X