[ska]

The standard for legal docs is to redline changes with an additional tool, because you don't necessarily trust the other contributors. They have decent tools for this, and the system works ok I suppose. Editing tends to be in tic-toc fashion anyways so I guess it works. You could do someting like this with git and a markup language, but I don't know you'd convince many lawyers that the squeeze was worth the juice.

[kyawzazaw]

What are the tools you mentioned here? Is there like a dominant software, similar to ArcGIS for GIS?

[ska]

I don't know the names. They all seem to have the pro Acrobat stuff, but more often use something also bundled with search tools perhaps? Communication between lawyers on opposite "sides" often seems to be by PDF, not source (although sometimes that too) so I imagined they both have working docs kept separate because they don't want to to share some of the markup/comments. I asked one of them about that they claimed that using clean pdf output (no metadata or history) was worth the extra hassle as it avoided costly errors.

Anyway that's my limited experience having dealt with a bunch of them - no expert.

[pseingatl]

It's never pdf. You can't easily make corrections on a pdf, never mind major revisions (such as moving sections around). If someone sends me a pdf I ask for a Word document, or convert the pdf to Word myself. Sending someone a pdf is a little like saying "fuck you."

[ska]

Are you a lawyer ? The workflow i am recalling, nobody is editing pdfs directly.

[pseingatl]

Confetiur. Collegial lawyers don't send each other pdf's. They are impossible to mark up. One "innovation" I have seen is with banks. They do not want their employees to be creative; edge cases don't exist, everything is binary. So the banks issue grids/tables containing a list of questions. The answers are found in the corresponding place on the table. Imagine 7 columns, all containing binary answers: "yes" or "no." Except, everything is not binary. So the 8th column contains, I dunno, 500 words, a minitable, etc., running over page after page. The other columns on these runover pages are blank. And these are all pdf's.