fadco : The Format Agnostic Document Collaborator

Here's the problem:

• Journals have stringent requirements on the format of documents they accept; they are all different
• Those writing journal articles seem to most often use MS Word and lots of emails and attachments; collaboration is hard.
• Word documents are in a horrible format; it is not open, not free (as in speech or beer), and can change from version to version.

Here's a possible solution - fadco:

• Versioning should be well defined and backups of versions should exist (in a place other than the writer's hard drives). Subversion provides an excellent solution: version control, access control, most clients have excellent diff tools, writers can download and work on documents wherever they have an internet connection.
• Solution should be OS agnostic.
• Will require a single type of format to be the "master format" - this should totally be Latex. Users should be able to easily convert to any number of other formats using the solution, but all changes should be done using the "master format".