Talers vs Google Docs
Google Docs is the collaborative equivalent of Word by Google. The application has seduced a large audience thanks to its real-time collaboration capabilities and its free availability. It is not completely free, however, because Google collects and sells the metadata of the software's users.
Talers is an alternative to Google Docs, designed to improve your productivity and writing experience.
Even though they have many similarities and reach a similar audience, Google Docs and Talers are not really the same family of software:
Google Docs is a document editing software, meaning that in addition to writing, it allows you to manage document margins, headers, freely mix fonts within a paragraph, and other similar features that fall under editing rather than writing.
Talers is a writing application, with many tools specific to pure writing (e.g., the thesaurus), and allows editing of projects (an organized set of documents with different statuses) rather than just documents. With Talers, editing is done after writing, not during.
With Talers and Google Docs, it is very easy to collaborate in real time. Both programs can share a document via a simple URL. However, unlike Google Docs, Talers offers the possibility to work 100% offline.
Talers is particularly suitable for web articles and all writing projects that need to be structured, such as :
novels or short stories,
screenplays,
dissertations and thesis,
science papers.
Google Docs
The greatest strengths of Google Docs are its collaborative aspect and its free availability. If you have a Google account, you can create a new document and share it with a few clicks.
The design is largely inspired by Microsoft Word, with a toolbar above the document to apply formatting options.
It is not only possible to share a document publicly, but also to share it with specific people.
Finally, the program offers an advanced proofreader.
Talers
Talers is a newer software designed to improve your productivity and writing experience.
Unlike Google Docs, Talers allows you to manage a project and not a single document. A project is a set of files and folders that can be easily accessed from the application and shared.
This kind of organization is perfect for writing a book or a screenplay (one text per chapter), a blog (one text per article), or a thesis. Since the architecture of a project is free, it is also possible to create folders to gather your notes, research results, images or quotes for inspiration, etc. The limit is your imagination!
Talers offers a different approach to styling your documents than Google Docs. Before you can apply a style, you first have to define it. It then becomes reusable, ensuring a consistent and visually pleasing document.
Talers' default style follows modern design canons. You don't have to worry about ‘making your text look pretty’ - it's going to be pretty!
A great little feature of Talers is auto-scrolling. This keeps the line you are writing at the same eye level. No need to add a lot of line breaks at the end of the text and scroll regularly to get the text in the middle of the screen.
Another very useful feature is that Talers supports Markdown. Markdown is a perfect language to quickly write a structured document with titles, lists, quotes, etc. For example, if you want to add a title, just type ‘#’, followed by a space.
Finally, unlike Google Docs, Talers can be used 100% offline with the desktop or phone application.
Conclusion
Talers and Google Docs both provide a native collaborative experience. With its speed and folder-based organization, Talers is best suited for projects that scale.
Talers is free to use, although some features are disabled. Talers protects your privacy and will not store or resell any information about you.
Pros of Google Docs compared to Talers:
mature software,
advanced correction even with the free version,
looks like Word so the interface is familiar.
Pros of Talers compared to Google Docs:
organization by folders,
respect of privacy,
much faster,
elegant rendering by default,
100% offline usable with the desktop application,
auto-scrolling (!),
supports Markdown,
tracking and writing statistics.
Note: a number of Talers features are still under development!