[ostorybook-dev] [IMPROVEMENT] Branching/alternative versions in oStorybook

[Bruno Raoult <braoult@xxxxxx>]

Hi,


My wife is likely to be published (in China) in the next few months. We 
have here an interesting use case, that writers may experience in a 
similar situation. Note: She uses LibreOffice for this book (not OSB).


She is discussing with 2 publishers, and is working on the final version 
of the book with them. However, the publishers have different views on 
what should be improved:

- They want different titles

- One wants to change the end (basically the last chapter)

- The other wants the book to be shortened by 25% (that is 50,000 on a 
total of 200,000 chinese characters).

In this situation, she is working with 2 copies of the files, which is a 
pain in the ass, as she also makes changes which are common in 2 files.

I have no idea on what could be implemented in OSB to handle this. We 
could imagine a system like:

- a list of versions (publisher1, publisher2, etc...)

- each piece of information could be in 1 or more versions: Title, 
character names, text sections, etc...

Example (in my case):

Publisher1:

- Title is "Title1", chapters 20, 23 and 25 disappear, a few paragraphs 
are changed, one character name is changed in whole book (that would 
imply to use macros to define names in the text I suppose), last chapter 
is "last1".

Publisher2:

- Title is "Title2", last chapter is "last2"

Common:

- All changes but the publisher-specific ones are common in both versions

So we could imagine a system where we could switch to a specific version 
to make changes, or view all versions for example with different colors, 
which would allow to edit common and specific parts.

This is vague, I know. I am not clear myself, I just looked what is my 
wife doing just now, and it looks like quite common if you face more 
than one publisher :-)


br.




--
oStorybook dev team