Slashdot Mirror
Domain: latex-project.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to latex-project.org.
Stories · 6
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Collaborative LaTeX Editor With Preview In Your Web Browser
Celarent Darii writes "Slashdot readers have undoubtedly heard of Google Docs and the many other online word processing solutions that run in the browser. However, as a long-time user of TeX and LaTeX, these solutions are not my favorite way of doing things. Wouldn't it be nice to TeX something in your browser? Well, look no further, there is now an online collaborative LaTeX editor with integrated rapid preview. Some fantastic features: quasi-instant preview, automatic versioning of source, easy collaboration and you can even upload files and pictures. Download your project later when you get home. Are you a TeX guru with some masterpieces? Might I suggest uploading them? For the beginner: you can start here." -
Is Free Software Ready For E-publishing?
johanneswilm writes "Over more than 3 years I have been writing my PhD thesis on the politics of Nicaragua. Being the most professional system for PDF generation, I went with LaTeX, and, to make the text accessible for the editors, I used the LyX editor. Now that the publication date comes near, I found I had to spend considerable time creating a script to convert the manuscript to formats such as Epub as none of the available tools were quite ready to do it automatically. Is LaTeX only good for writers in the natural sciences? Is the open source community boycotting ebook formats, as Richard Stallman has proposed? Are there better tools to do the same?" -
Collaborative Academic Writing Software?
Thomas M Hughes writes "Despite its learning curve, LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing. By abstracting out the substance from the content, it becomes possible to focus heavily on the writing, and then deal with formatting later. However, LaTeX is starting to show its age, specifically when it comes to collaborative work. One solution to this is to simply pair up LaTeX with version control software (such as Subversion) to allow multiple collaborators to work on the same document at one time. But adding Subversion to the mix only seems to increase the learning curve. Is there a way to combine the power of LaTeX with the power of Subversion without scaring off a non-technical writer? The closest I can approximate would be to have something like Lyx (to hide the learning curve of LaTeX) with integrated svn (to hide the learning curve of svn). However, this doesn't seem available. Google Docs is popular right now, but Docs has no support for LaTeX, citation management, or anything remotely resembling decent formatting options. Are there other choices out there?" -
Electronic Publishing Using Free Software?
Arkaein asks: "I am planning on electronically self publishing a book that I want to write, typeset, and create diagrams for on my Linux PC. Most of the diagrams for the book will be generated through scripted custom software, and I want the final product to be as compact as possible. I would like some advice from Slashdot on what Free Software tools I should use, with an emphasis on scripting efficiency. I am planning on using hyperlinked PDF for the final book format. To date I have used LateX for writing basic papers and have created vector images using Xfig and raster images edited using The GIMP. I used dvipdfm to convert my results into PDF. What I haven't done is create a hyperlinked PDF document, or generated xfig, postscript or any other vector image format through software, or worked on any document project of this magnitude before. I have thought about using raster images, my current software used for web content similar to what will go into the book creates raster images which I convert to PNG, this works well because the images are fairly simple diagrams with few colors and compress very well. I estimate that the 200 or so images I need for my book would require about 10K each as high-res PNGs for a total of 2 MB. This sounds acceptable, but would probably be smaller with higher image quality in vector format. Are LaTeX, Xfig and dvipdfm the answers, or do I need to look in other directions?" -
Is Latex Still Worth Learning?
Bocaj asks: "I have start back to college and have to write a few technical papers. Right now it's mostly physics, but I'm a CS major and there will be many more papers to come. I've tried all of the office suites with little luck in getting them to format complex formulas correctly. I'm trying to learn Latex, but I am wondering if I should. Is Latex still the defacto standard for this kind of stuff? What about SGML or XML? What is everyone else using?" -
Free Tools for Collaborative Editing?
zachrahan asks: "I have almost completely removed Microsoft Office from my work-flow. One hurdle remains, though -- sending scientific manuscripts out to colleagues for comments. Everyone I know simply uses MS Word's Track Changes feature for this. To tell the truth, this works quite well. However, I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over. I've been working a bit with Multivalent, which is very promising, but still firmly in alpha. Are there any other free, cross-platform tools for collaborative marking up of PDF or HTML (or other) documents, a la Word's track changes feature?"