Textflow: Lets Several Editors Work on One Document

Collaborative editing isn’t something that need to do very often, but when I do, the first thing that I’m going to be installing is the absolutely brilliant Textflow,  which just launched in public beta yesterday. TextFlow is an Adobe AIR application that lets one ‘master editor’ to merge documents from up to seven other editors.

Using TextFlow, editors send their changes to the master editor, who then can simply drag and drop all of the different versions of a document to TextFlow, which will then look at all the documents in the service, finding all of the edits, and then will display all the changes, allowing the main editor to quickly run through and accept or reject edits to their master document, like you do with track changes.

The best way to see how TextFlow works is to watch their demo video.

Right now, TextFlow can only handle documents up to 10 pages long, and contributions from seven contributors. In most cases, that would be fine, and if it’s not, it should be easy enough to break down your document into a couple of 10 page chunks and then bringing each of the seperate “master” chunks back together into one pretty  document. The other thing that TextFlow can’t handle at the moment are charts and graphics, but really, those would be seperate elements that you have to bring in from somewhere else anyway, so to me, that’s not a deal breaker.

Now that I’ve seen the video twice, I am off to hunt for a document I can collaborate with other people on!

(Video Source: TextFlow)