Guides

Getting Started

Create Your Account

After having entered your invitation code, you're asked to create an account. When creating an account you can easily manage multiple discussions, get notified on events, protect discussions with a password and/or publish them.
You can also skip this step, go on to the home page and start your first discussion. If you do so, please make sure that you set a bookmark for the discussion's URL.

Start Your First Discussion

To start a discussion, either copy & paste your text into the discussion box or write something. doingText will treat your text the following way:

  • Every paragraph will be an extra line.
  • Existing high-class formattings will be lost. Plain text is the basis. If you still want formatting please see the textile section.
For a more detailled introduction, we also have a "Getting Started Tour".

The Home Page

Your Homepage brings you the News Feed, a list with Your dicussions and the starting box for new discussions.

  • The News Feed shows recent activities made within your discussions, i.e. lines that were updated, comments that were given or discussions you were invited to.
    Within the News Feed settings you can choose if you want to receive event notifications within your News Feed or by email.
  • The list of Your dicussions contains all your discussions: Those you created yourself, those you were invited to and the public discussions you were visiting. Both the News Feed and Your dicussions are sorted by date.
  • For starting a new disscussion, please see "Start your first discussion".

In the header you can also reach your discussions within the search field. When you click on the field the first 20 discussions are listed. Type in the name of the desired discussion and get a refined list.

Editing and Formatting

Change the Discussion's Title

To change the title of your discussion, click onto the name. This will be the name that appears on the list of discussions. Also, the title won't appear on the exported files. So you can choose a telling name which makes the discussion easy to recognize.

Writing

  • To edit a line click on it. While writing, the recent line is automatically growing with your inserted text. When you hit enter and thus create a line break, this will create a new line after saving. There is also a button to add a new line.
  • Saving takes place also automatically as soon as you click on another line or another place outside the text.
  • You can move a line by dragging the number on the left hand site, pulling the line to the desired place and dropping it there.
  • Highlight single lines: When you mouse over the lines, you will see a balloon appear on the right hand side. Here you find the link "change color".

Switch to previous versions

The balloon that appears when you mouse over the lines also provides a version switcher. Browse through the versions (they will show up within the line) and if you wish to return to an earlier version, do so by clicking the link "revert to version x".

Textile

We use Textile for formatting texts. It's a simple markup language and you don't need a lot to learn. Add the markups to the actual text. Textile is not activated by default. To use it, add .textile to the title of the discussion.
Here is an overview of the formatting options and how to use them in doingText:

_emphasis_
*strong*
Links: "linktext":http://test.com
Images: !http://test.com/image.jpg!
h1./h2. headings
# Numeric list
* Bulleted list

Insert Pictures

Having Textile activated, you can insert any image which is available on the internet.

Communication, Sharing and Collaboration

Comments

When clicking on a line a sidebar rolls out which contains the both the comments and made changes. The changes are higlighted so you easily how a text has been edited by your cowriters. These are shown chronologically, so every comment regards to the version right below.
Cowriters can also leave comments without being logged in.
Comments can be deleted. Every cowriter can delete his/her own comment and the owner of a discussion (the one who started it), is allowed to delete all comments.

Share the Text or Embed It Into Your Website

As a cowriter the menu link "Share" provides you with the link of the discussion and code for embedding the discussion on your website.
If you're the "owner" of a discussion, i.e. if you started it, you can specify within the sharing settings who has access to your discussion. Share the URL with everyone you wish to work with or add collaborators by their doingText username. The permission's box lets you define if the discussion can be found, read, commented or edited by anyone or just by people s who know the password.

Track Changes

Whenever a line is changed, you see the differences within the comments. Insertions are marked green while deletions are marked red.

Plus, doingText gives you a quick look on what has happened by coloring the comment balloon. The dark orange indicates changes (comments and/or edits) recently added by your cowriters. Green are the line last changed by you. And the paler it gets, the older the last changes.

RSS: Click on the RSS symbol to subscribe to the RSS feed of a discussion

History: Within the history you can see each and every change of the whole discussion sorted by date.

Protect a Discussion

Got secure data? Within the sharing settings you can set a password. Password protected discussions are then SSL-secured.

Publish a Discussion

The option "find" within the sharing settings lets you publish a discussion. Publishing means your discussion can be searched for on our site and by search machines. If your discussion is not password-protected, anyone can leave a comment or edit the text.

Direct Messages

Send messages to other doingText users. On their profile (doingtext.com/username) you find the "Send Message"-link.

Export Options

Importing files in another way than copy & paste will come. Stay tuned for it!

Exporting the text is possible in 2 formats:

  1. as a txt-file,
  2. as a pdf,

The download link is at the top of each discussion.

Some words to the different file types:
→ The .txt opens in the browser. The reason is that special characters such as Germanic umlauts or Asian signs are only displayed correctly within the browser at this moment. You can then copy and paste the text into any other standalone text editor.
→ The pdf-file is offered as a download.

Mobile Usage

You can use doingText with any mobile deivce that has a browser. Depending on what you need (and how big your screen is), you can might prefer the read-only mobile view. (Here's an example how it looks like.)

To use the whole range of features, you can switch to the standard version. The link is to find at the bottom of each page.

Feedback

We're happy to hear what you think about doingtext. For short notes you can comfortably use the feedback button on the right hand side.

The feedback button will also lead you to our uservoice feedback forum. Uservoice gives you the space for more elaborated feedback. You can propose new features and vote on them, report bugs and use the comments for broader reports.

Alternatively, you can send us an email to .

Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

Please follow the links to get detailed information about our privacy policy and our Terms of Service.