Interesting Quarto extension for collaborative editing

[Bai-Li-NOAA]

I came across an interesting Quarto extension yesterday that could be useful for collaborative work on Quarto documents. The critic-markup extension provides a filter for processing CriticMarkup syntax when rendering to PDF, DOCX, and HTML. The syntax is straightforward, and the extension supports three rendering modes: the original version, a markup version showing edits and comments, and an edited mode that produces a clean final document.

This could be useful for team members who prefer to provide edits and comments directly within a .qmd file rather than through pull request comments. One aspect I find especially appealing is that the .qmd file itself becomes a record of the document's evolution. Because comments and suggested edits can remain in the source file, contributors who join later can review the history of discussions and decisions in context.

The file could become lengthy if there are many comments, but the final report can still be rendered in edited mode for submission while preserving the full history of comments and revisions in a single source document. Markup examples rendered to PDF, DOCX, and HTML from a FIMS manuscript can be found here (need to download the files to see the comments). Below is a screenshot of the rendered PDF with comments visible, and the original .qmd file is available here.

I'm not sure whether collaborative editing of .qmd files is still an area of interest for the workflows project. If not, feel free to close this discussion! I'm also unsure about the current maintenance status of the extension. This isn't meant as a recommendation to adopt the extension or to develop a custom alternative, only as an example of a workflow that may be relevant to the project's goals.

[Schiano-NOAA]

@Bai-Li-NOAA This is really neat! I am definitely going to test this out. I think this is definitely relevant to the project. I think if it's intuitve enough, it could be something we could pursue, but if not and if it required teaching users this, then maybe not the route we want to go. I'll go some testing in the future!

I want to go the collaborative editing route and determine ways users could go about this so I wonder if there are additional extensions that do something similar in different ways 🤔

[Bai-Li-NOAA]

Sounds great! Installing the extension should only require a single command. I’ve also added a brief editing guide at the beginning of the manuscript, fewer than 20 lines of text.

My co-authors haven’t tested it yet, and @kellijohnson-NOAA will be the first to try it 😉 . We can provide feedback afterward and let you know whether it feels useful or ends up being overkill.

[Bai-Li-NOAA]

Also, if the extension is included in a report template repo, users may not need to install it themselves.