Quartorium: Collaborate with non-technical users

[andjar]

Description

Quarto enables scientific writing where text and code can be tightly integrated, which are important features for open and reproducible research. A current key challenge, however, is how to combine this with co-authors and collaborators who are not familiar with git, markdown or quarto. Quartorium is a node.js application aiming to bridge that gap. It integrates closely with git and provides a Word-/Google Docs-like interface where collaborators can edit text and add comments. Figures, references and metadata are shown as fixed blocks to provide context. When the collaborator commits their changes, the text is converted back to qmd and committed to a new branch so that the main author can choose what to merge and not.

• A short youtube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBLlVgVVQiE

• Code: https://github.com/andjar/quartorium

The application is functional but more work is needed on the parser and serializer. Under the hood, the qmd is rendered to JATS and then parsed into a json that tiptap/prosemirror can render. At commit, the original qmd is used as template for metadata/chunks and the modified text injected into it using the serializer.

I've currently got limited time to work on this, but comments and contributions are of course welcome.