Re: What's your favourite *under_publicized* editing feature ofEmacs?

[David Kastrup]

Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> writes:

> On 26/02/2011 3:13 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>>> Anything I'm working on that would be expensive to lose goes under
>>>> version control anyway.
>>> Then woe betide you if you ever work on, say, a novel rather
>>> than a computer program.
>>
>> Don't know about novels, but at least revision control works very well
>> for academic publications.
>
> Oh, really? I for one cannot recall ever seeing a version 1.5 of a
> novel or a version 2.0 of a magazine article.

Well, I've been responsible for the typesetting software for "Die
Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Ernst Troeltsch"
<URL:http://www.st.evtheol.uni-muenchen.de/troeltsch/kga/arbeit/index.html>,
and you'll find that he published various articles in about 5 venues,
with various changes in wording and content.  The challenge was to
present a readable manner in which the purchaser of the critical edition
could tell for each of the various venues what wording has been
employed, what the differences to the other versions were, and on which
pages of each version the various text passages were to be found.

So definitely there were various versions of the same article published.
And even if your work is not worth publishing more than once, you can
easily have several major revisions before that, and intermediate
versions might contain content that you first removed, then later
decided to use anyway.

The gestation of both articles and novels is rarely linear.

-- 
David Kastrup