PDF documents - is there a good tool for remote collaboration: highlightings, annotations, comments, notes?

Posted by 22111
Dec 22, 2013 at 02:29 PM

I just found the most weird (well, academic background from Austria, so… - and presumably most advanced) editor of them all:

CTE = Classical Text Editor

with an almost incredible set of useful features indeed:

http://cte.oeaw.ac.at/?id0=features

No price available though; as the French say, le prix serait-il à la tête du client ?

It’s a weird thing for which it seems you need some sort of “personal introduction”, similar to those ancient “oral-only” languages (of which most are dead today, for this very reason), have a look into this link, of which I permit myself to cite one commentary in full here ( c’est pour la bonne cause, n’est-ce pas ? ) :

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2010/03/01/classical-text-editor-useful/

hank
I don’t think it is too easy to figure out by yourself. I’ve just learned how to use it but with the help of someone who already knew it. The big advantage to it, in my opinion, is the ease with which you can note variants. You type in your base text from one ms, and then read through another and when you have a variant, you click on the annotation button and you type it in. The variant is anchored to the word or words in the main text that you had highlighted, and when you print it, you get a nice set of annotations that are automatically produced. If you want, you can even have a couple of sets of annotations and notes. Doing this work on a regular word processor would be almost impossible. I don’t know what your text is, but if you have everything done and your problem is typesetting and how things will look on the printed page, then I don’t think CTE will help you very much. If you’re producing a critical edition from several manuscripts with a large number of variants and notes, then it will help you a ton.
Comment on Aug 12th, 2010 at 7:55 pm

I think, though, that this tool is of the utmost interest for the above subject I permitted myself to broadly broaden with my above intervention. Of course, the fact that no price is given, is awful and could mean they ask you precisely what you want to use it for, then set up a contract permitting just that precise use you explained to them, and anything even very far to “commercial” would get a 4-digit licence price per seat. Serais-je parano ?