Make authorship traceable word-by-word through author colors

[menelic]

The authors indicator is confusing because it can only show authorship per line, if a change is made in a line, its unclear what was changed. To get word-by-word authorship tracking, text should be marked in the respective authors color (which needs to be persistent for this and other reasons, see #175 ) as is done in Etherpad. As in some Etherpad versions, there could be an on the fly on-off switch for that.

[adityab]

This makes sense, but remember that Etherpad is for plaintext and does not do things like coloring for text foreground/background. ODF will contain text with such formatting, and such authorship highlights may cause confusion when mixed with that.

Open to proposals for that of course. :)

[menelic]

That is why it should be switchable. Please note that such colors are also used in WebODFs rich annotation feature (see screenshot from http://www.webodf.org/demo below). This is why such on/off toggle would be helpful to implement to solve such issues. But I'd even say that collaborative features should be priorised since the oC team has often said that collaboration is at the core of their WebODF implementation. For that, word-by-word tracing, tracking changes and persistent user colors in documents are crucial.

[menelic]

Another way of solving this issue would be to mark authorship to faint underlines in the author's color, as is done before each line right now. This would allow all other color formatting to remain visible - even underlines, as they are rendered on to of the author color and are (mostly) thinner as well.

[despens]

I recommend checking out how it is done in http://hackpad.com/ This is an etherpad fork by the author of the Gnome app "Tomboy".

[menelic]

The hackpad implementation looks great and it seems this could easily be done with the avatar pics in oC6. +1