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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?"
Word has version control ;p
Seriously, LaTeX is great in part because of the fact that it's quite hard to do anything crazy so people stick with the defaults which look good.
WORD with 'track changes' enabled.
I think any technical writer that isn't scared away by the syntax of LaTeX should be able to master "svn update", and "svn commit". And if that's too much, there are plugins for Windows, Mac, and Linux that integrate Subversion with the normal file browser.
Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Technical writers shouldn't have a problem using technical tools, no?
has integrated rcs and cvs. Does your project really require svn specifically as its version control system?
You're gonna have to write it yourself..
I refused to learn latex when I was in academia. I am shocked it is still around. But the apps I saw that might have replaced it are probably either too pricey or long dead these days. I remember writing my thesis is Word and I had to reboot the PC after every major format change to free up memory. (Days when 8MB as a lot of memory.)
Seems like someone could write a good gui to support latex and subversion or git.
Think Deeply.
...when you stand up and announce "What this group needs is some latex subversion. Excuse me while I whip this out..."
Yeah, it does.
Word has version control
That really made my day! I almost ruined a keyboard with my G&T (I managed to keep it in, gin in Finland is too expensive to spew on a keyboard).
But seriously, a collaborative wrapper on LaTeX woud be really neat. Nothing handles citations & equations as well as LaTeX.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Ummm ... isn't substance the same as content?
We know what was meant but it isn't what was said.
In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex. Perhaps it is the standard in engineering & CS or other fields where researchers use Unix on their workstations, but Word and EndNote remain the lingua franca elsewhere.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
Try out M-x make-frame-on-display
True interactive collaborative editing with all the Emacs tools for version control, TeX editing and everything else.
(Don't blame me, I found out about it here on slashdot)
Latex has an \include statement, so split the sections up into separate files, so they don't have to deal with conflicts. That'll simplify svn usage quite a bit, at least until they start editing others' text, at which point you have bigger problems to worry about.
If they still can't handle it, then have them dedicate part of their funding to adding revision control to lyx.
Honestly Latex is pretty simple. I'm not sure what you mean by Learning Curve. the first time I ever used it, I had an entire mathematical document complete with all the symbols you can imagine formatted perfectly in practically no time, just from looking at online tutorials and use of google.
If you want to hide SVN, you can set it up as a DAV server and every file save results in a commit to the SVN repository.
While many prefer his Fantastic Four or the later Fourth World stuff for DC, I think Jack Kirby's early work on the Marvel monster books ranks among his most enjoyable. "Gobby, the Living Document" is a personal favorite -- although "Memo from Vornu" and "I Conference Called Zimvaxx" are also fine examples.
Breakfast served all day!
I use LyX to write my LaTeX docs, and it has some support for using version control (using some version control software called RCS). I haven't tried it yet, but I've been tempted.
Thus far, I've been in the position where I just write most of my contribution in Lyx, then export it to plain Latex and sent it to collaborators. From there we just do the collaboration in plain Latex. The problem for me hasn't been the lack of version control but rather the ability/willingness of collaborators to all use LyX. Now, one can import LaTeX into Lyx, but if you do a closed loop (write -> export -> import again) you'll find things are not quite as nice in the end, so this hasn't seemed to be an optimal solution.
As for people saying that technical writers ought to be able to use technical software: A) in many cases it's a question of willingness to commit the time, not ability and B) just because you're technically knowledgeable in, say, cosmological physics, doesn't mean you're adept with computers. ...trust me on this one.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Isn't this the purpose of http://www.webdav.org/?
The find the learning curve of SVN is setting up the repository and then checking out the initial documents. The GUI, on the mac use svnX, helps out with this initial step, and anyone who can muster LaTex should be able to work with something like it. Also, there are context menu options available.
What really made things simple for me, on a day to day basis, was a shell script I wrote to automatically update my local versions from the repository. It is quick and dirty, but keeps my files up to date. For a collaborative effort, this is not what the best solution, I only include it to say that there are some things that can make SVN much more accessible. Although I do program, I never really had anyone teach me SVN, and worked out the mechanics as I needed.
I would also suggest that if the writing were divided into small sections that were then included in the larger document, then the issue of merging might be minimized. This would also maximize the insure that the collaborative writers were not changing the overall formating.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I've been using LaTeX with subversion for collaboration for years. The LaTeX learning curve is much more an issue than the subversion learning curve.
But if the issue arises at all -- that means you are collaborating, and hopefully somebody in the group knows how to use LaTeX. And that's the best way to learn LaTeX.
Try http://monkeytex.bradcater.webfactional.com.
It's a side project, but it does some simple things.
What about Mediawiki with LaTeX formula support for writing? After completion the text could be converted to a LaTeX document.
Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
It would be what dishonest people keep trying to turn the Constitution into in order to justify their desire for state power?
I know that isn't what you were getting at. I'm being somewhat facetious but I do have a point.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Wow, as if someone had to ask. All you gotta do is...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
what about DOCBOOK. It is a XML based structure that is easy to integrate in SVN. And it is designed to split content from presentation...
unfortunately, good docbooks editors are expensive, like xmlspy. however, this worth a look.
The way I'd tackle this is to setup a central server then install screen. Have each collaborator share the same screen session. That way, every one can collaborate on the same document in real time. The obvious advantage of this is that the fastest typists, which are generally the more experienced coders, will have the best chance of getting edits in place. To tackle the code versioning issue, alias the vi session to something like "cvs commit xxxx". So anytime someone edits a file, it will commit it to CVS.
This is agile development at its finest.
svn and latex usage both are actually pretty easy, but the installation and configuration can be a pain in the *ss
the idea of google docs supporting latex is good.
maybe there is another web based colaborative editor who would support this? opengoo i.e.
Subversion is awful for detached work: it must speak to the server to record changes. CVS is no better. git could work, since each person's local copy is a full working repository. It is also terrible about allowing you to flush accidentally recorded debris, or out-of-date branches that have had their files copied elsewhere. It is also about tracking changes from another repository, with their history. Frankly, Subversion needs to be entirely discarded except for those few projects that are like CVS and where the master server is critical for the 'trunk' codeline.
Google docs is fine until you start dealing with anything different to a Mail on Sunday article. Forget equations and figures. And if google goes down like it has the last few weeks...
Apple's new web based system is alright for footnotes and things, and for comments, but for serious collaboration with merging different versions and edits, then you can forget it. (If someone from apple reads this, please add gawdamn ODF support to pages for the love of all things sacred).
I still end up using latex to render equations and slap them into the document as a tiff file. And last time I used pages to collaborate with M$ office users it messed up the footnote marks for institute addresses and I ended up installing the mac version of office anyway :S So lets rule out apple for the time being.
Lyx didn't support the styles and bibliography for the physics journals I was writing for last summer (phys rev, elsevier). Lyx is not a bad idea, is it ready?
Microsoft word + equations = hell on earth. And having just lost 2 weeks of my life dealing with micro$oft's APIs, circular help systems and automatic updates every 3 minutes, I threw the thing straight back at IT and vowed never to go there again. Someone else might be able to tell you how good the M$ online collaboration tools are, but it won't be me! ;-)
If your collaborators are like mine, they want to see a return to fortran and VMS. My current line of thinking is to try to coerce them into using latex instead of m$ word, and volunteer to be version control. Then use something like git on your own machine to merge all the different branches as they e-mail their changes back to you. For me it's the lesser of all evils.
When you actually come to submit you'll still have to jump through hoops to please the journal editors with figure file formats and stuff ("we want 4 gigs of EPS files please author") but the process of collaborating on the authorship will be a damn sight easier.
Good article subject though. You've hit on a topic that has been in my mind for the last few months too (sorry about the long reply!)
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Do you have to work on the document at the same time, or do you mean something like track changes?
mediawiki + Tex extension. We use it at work and its just great. Along with some graphiz support for, well, graphs!
You can make things even easier by using AbiWord, the multi-platform word processor.
AbiWord has a collaboration plug-in that allows multiple authors to simultaneously work on a document. It also has a LaTeX exporter that will preserve most formatting and document elements, including MathML equations (which are converted to LaTeX ones during export). You could also save in OpenDocument format, open the .odt file in OpenOffice, and then use its LaTeX exporter, if you find that its LaTeX output is better.
Either way, you should be able to handle collaboration and LaTeX export with easy-to-use, open source word processors instead of (potentially) confusing tools.
What kind of LaTEX do you need to be writing? If it's just mathematics, and you're on linux or osx, you may want to consider LaTeXiT. It renders equations to pdf and image formats, one of which I know for sure you can embed in a google document. It also lets you maintain libraries of equations, so you can modify them later.
I used it recently, in conjunction with Apple keynote for the Mac. It was far easier to deal with just the math LaTEX subset, and only at points where I needed it. I imagine a non-technical audience may agree.
Laequed purports to do something similar for windows. Haven't tried it myself.
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
In fact the most important part of the problem is to make your co-authors use whichever system you use (install latex for the start, then subversion then learn how to put them together.. people prefer just print out your draft and supply comments with pen). So far I think best solution is to use web-apps. There are at least two usable: http://monkeytex.bradcater.webfactional.com and latexlab.org. They're not perfect of course, so I mainly tend to just use etherpad. Miss synax highlithing though....
So TFS appears to think that "academic writing" excludes the humanities and other disciplines that don't often find the need to include equations in their writing.
In any case, is LaTeX worth the learning curve for these disciplines? I recently wrote a 40 pg. paper in Word, using a good template and styles, I didn't run into any formatting issues, and when converted to PDF it looks nice. I liked being able to create the table of contents automatically.
Facing the prospect of only having longish things to write from this point on, I'm wondering if I should take the time to learn LaTeX now. On the other hand, if I do that, am I giving up being able to easily send drafts to other people for review? What about reference management with stuff like Zotero?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
there is a tool called latexdiff it is pretty good in showing the difference between two latex files
The post reads: "By abstracting out the substance from the content, it becomes possible to focus heavily on the writing..."
Abstracting out the substance from the content?
You're one of those humanities folks, aren't you?
check out edukalibre.
"Despite its learning curve, LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing."
Wrong. It may be standard in the physical sciences and
math; however, in the social sciences, Microsoft Word is used by many.
Yours in SOCIALISM,
Kilgore Trout
It seems to me markdown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) has a much shallower learning curve than latex, and it is already supported by several wiki systems. All you would need was a html -> printed page post-processor, which may already exist.
You might try Laboratree (http://laboratree.org/). We have built a social networking platform off of OpenSocial and created a document and data set management tool that has Subversion like editing. It is used by a couple of hundred groups currently.
Lyx has a track changes function, very similar to that of Word. Personally, I find that tracking changes quickly results in a very cluttered document. I prefer to use svn in combination with a different diff program, wdiff, that can identify differences word-by-word (and also allows for ignoring changes in white space, which are usually irrelevant for latex).
:)). the tex_diff.sh contain (on a single line)
I use a shell script where i type
tex_diff.sh <old file> <new file> > result.html
to create an html page where the differences are marked (blue for new words, strike over red for deleted words). The file result.html can be viewed in a standard html browser (e.g. then one you are using right now
wdiff --start-delete='<font color=red>' --end-delete='</font>' --start-insert='<font color=blue>' --end-insert='</font>' $1 $2 | sed -e '1,2 d;s/$/<br>/'
change the font commands using basic html if you prefer a different style. it is also possible to use wdiff to show only new text.
Drop the draconian, complicated, unnecessarily obscure and often merely arbitrary academic bullshit formatting necessities and write the damn things with open office. Save the world a few million hours of real time so the students/researchers can actually be productive rather than merely busy.
Why bother
Much of the complexity of LaTeX can be abstracted away in lighter text-based formats that are compiled to LaTeX to produce print-destined output (ReStructured Text, used in python Docutils, is one example.) If you are concerned about the combined complexity of LaTeX + version control, that could help reduce the overall complexity.
Well, in any scientific collaboration consisting of more then four people, there's most likely someone senior and crotchety who's stuck in his ways doesn't want to completely change the way he works. You'd also have to build a consensus that svn+latex was the best available solution, and that might not be so easy. I've used svn+latex. It sucked, partly because svn sucks. (Git is a lot better.)
If the goal is to write a scientific paper with a large number of authors, I think the most reasonable thing to do would be to write it in MediaWiki, which is the wiki software used by Wikipedia. In particular, MediaWiki has good support for LaTeX-formatted math. Once all the authors have had a chance to make their edits, and the whole thing has converged to the exact words, punctuation, and math you want, you convert it to LaTeX and you're all set. The conversion is ridiculously easy, because all the math is in LaTeX already, and you can use a script to convert, e.g., ==Procedure== to \section{Procedure}.
One big win with wiki->latex compared to version control+latex is that although it's fairly easy to learn a couple of the most basic commands of a vc system, it's much more difficult to learn to use it well enough to figure out who changed what, resolve conflicting edits, etc. A wiki is designed to do all that using a web interface, which makes it dead easy. To see what I'm talking about, go to a wikipedia article and click on the history history tab.
This is all assuming it's a scientific paper, which just needs to be worked on for a certain amount of time, and then it's published and you're not going to mess with it anymore. There's another interesting situation in academic writing, which is a textbook that's going to be edited on an ongoing basis over the years. That's an example where I think the case for vc+latex is much stronger.
Find free books.
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Gitit is a wiki that uses a git repository as a backend and exports to LaTeX. I haven't used it myself, and I expect you'll have to do a bit of hand-editing of the generated LaTeX to match whatever template you're using, but it might be worth looking into.
Wikis are designed for collaborative writing, and many if not most support version control. I don't know of any that support LaTeX (with rendering), but I would think that it could be added to something like MediaWiki.
I came across a Wordpress plugin that apparently renders LaTeX:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-latex/
Perhaps it's code could be adopted for a wiki. Of course, the user would still have to know LaTeX, but they could copy and paste from their favorite GUI LaTeX editor.
I wrote a collaborative novel last year which was laid out in LaTeX. Each chapter was written by its 1-3 writers on a document I created in Google Docs. At the end, I wrote a Python script that downloaded all 23 chapters, translated them into LaTeX docs in the style that I wanted for the book layout (most of the markup I had to worry about was stuff like quotes, new paragraphs, italics, special characters, etc (it was not full of equations)), and it then called PDFLaTeX on the master document which combined them into a book. This allowed people to modify their documents online, and for me to handle the layout in parallel with the up-to-date text.
So, this allowed like 12 people to have no learning curve, but it depended on me knowing Python and LaTeX. Not sure if I answered the question. Sorry. Just use version numbers or something.
The line-oriented diffs of svn are particularly useless for a language in which newlines are often not semantically meaningful. To get anything useful out of this approach, people end up constraining their use of paragraph reflowing, so you end up with crazy hard-to-read .tex files, which is definitely something that should be handled by a revision-control system better.
It also interacts badly with other synchronization methods between multiple machines. I use a laptop and a desktop, and synchronize them with unison. But svn changes their local file formats across platforms and versions, so when the .svn directories get synced between the current Debian and current fink (OS X) versions, stuff gets corrupted. The workaround there is to *not* sync on my side with unison, and instead use "check into svn and check back out" as a synchronization mechanism. But that leads to checking in half-done stuff that gets in other people's way.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The social-science-oriented areas like HCI tend to use Word. The engineering- and math-oriented areas like machine learning and theory use latex. The other areas seem to have a mix, to the extent that most conferences feel required to offer both Word and latex templates.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This will reportedly be possible next year with Office 14.
If you are still using Word for whatever reason, and want several-people-in-the-document collaboration in Word today, you can try my plutext collaboration software - see http://dev.plutext.org/blog/
You get paragraph level versioning, and changes tracked properly.
Ask around your colleagues and more senior peers (lecturers, supervisors, professors). See what they use for their collaborative work.
If you're looking for a longer term academic career, check out what conferences and journals in your fields ask for.
When I started my PhD I asked around and found out that the students in disciplines that used a lot of mathematical notations, formulae, equations etc prefered LaTeX, but everybody else (the majority) used Microsoft Word. That's still true. People do their 70,000 word theses in Word, submit jointly co-authored papers in Word.
Use what your community uses, these are the people you will be handing in work to, sending drafts for comments, writing shared reports. No point upsetting them by sending them a document in a format they are not used to dealing with.
Buzzword is excellent. It allows users to create print-perfect documents, collaborate with any number of co-authors, and control versions and keep track of changes. PC Magazine calls it "an impressively well-designed application." I use it daily and I have to say I love it. http://buzzword.acrobat.com/
Assuming that any constitution, no matter how well framed, would still apply exactly two centuries later is foolish. It would be like trying to live your life according to a document that was framed for Middle-Eastern people 2000 years a..go...
I see where you're coming from now...
I've done research and writing at federal institutions, private and state universities and commercial concerns, collaborated with people and labs in a dozen or so countries, and submitted to journals in several different fields. Never once did I hear LaTex mentioned as something available to write with or as a format acceptable for manuscript submission. I happen to be familiar with LaTex due to years of Linux tinkering, and from working with people who also happened to be at least modestly capable with it. Even so I'd use something that didn't require concern with command/control syntax. My brain is better used on the science and language syntax.
Microsoft Word can track changes according to collaborator. A particular format need only be created once, then saved as a template, many of which are available for download. There are various referencing packages that merge well with Word. I have run across other researchers who preferred something else for writing, but never have I run across one who did not have Word available or was not adequately familiar with it.
Perhaps there are fields I've not worked in that allow use of LaTex for writing and submission. I'll bet there are none that require it, and Word is acceptable to most if not all.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/latex4ling/journals/ is a short article listing LaTex friendly journals. I disagree with the assessments about Springer and Elsevier, as every one of their journals I've written for did not list LaTex as acceptable. That leaves a very short list of journals that do accept it (and two major publishers that do not accept it). The list is a lot shorter than just the list of >35,000 journals referenced by NIH/National Library of Medicine's PubMed, the database I'm most familiar with.
Mod me down if you must for dropping the *nix flag and waving the enemy's, but these are the observations of a trained observer.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
TWiki has some extension for LaTeX/MathML...
Plone (http://plone.org) is a CMS that you can use to setup a portal or intranet with features similar as Google Docs. In fact, there's a module that let you write math using latex format: http://plone.org/products/latex-math-image
Plone is not only open source, but has a strong support from its community as any successful FLOSS project and also professional provided by a network of business and people in more than 60 countries as you can check in http://plone.net/
http://ice.usq.edu.au/ -- it's open source and uses subversion.
You can create a wiki that lets the user input LaTeX source code, and then has a tab to create PDF from that. The mediawiki plugin is called LaTeXDoc. You can google for that and for an article about this system in the MAA Focus.
I prefer to use a different diff program, wdiff, that can identify differences word-by-word (and also allows for ignoring changes in white space, which are usually irrelevant for latex).
:)). the tex_diff.sh contain (on a single line)
I use a shell script where i type
tex_diff.sh <old file> <new file> > result.html
to create an html page where the differences are marked (blue for new words, strike over red for deleted words). The file result.html can be viewed in a standard html browser (e.g. then one you are using right now
wdiff --start-delete='<font color=red>' --end-delete='</font>' --start-insert='<font color=blue>' --end-insert='</font>' $1 $2 | sed -e '1,2 d;s/$/<br>/'
change the font commands using basic html if you prefer a different style. it is also possible to use wdiff to show only new text.
Since 1.6 or so, lyx has subversion integration. (File>Version Control). It is not 100% complete tough, as you have to create an svn folder yourself, and it won't update anything but the .lyx document.
Yet you can commit you changes and type in a message and update your file.
I'd say that you need at least one person in the team that knows svn, and set up the others
i you ask the average person what they think of an academic article or academic book from the 1930s or 1950s, vs the stuff that LaTeX 'churns out' (for that is exactly what it does, removes the human eye for beauty from the process, and attempts to automate an artistic act, namely, typesetting and layout), they would pick the former old books almost every time, as being 'nicer to look at, more pleasing to the eye'.
then ANYONE could edit it. and it wouldnt be 'HARD FOR NO REASON'.
this fails the main foundations of academia.
1. restrict access
2. make everything seem vastly complicated
At the Noosphere Research Institute, we use open source Noosphere software for collaborative LaTeX and much more. The public site for physics is PlanetPhysics
http://planetphysics.org/
and of course we use Apache/Perl/MySQL.
In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex. Perhaps it is the standard in engineering & CS or other fields where researchers use Unix on their workstations, but Word and EndNote remain the lingua franca elsewhere.
How many equations do you have to write in that field? The higher the number you have to write regularly, the more likely you'll be using LaTeX.
Yeah, but the choice isn't between LaTeX and 1930s typesetting, it's between LaTeX and Microsoft Word. Which doesn't even do kerning by default. "Ugly as hell" doesn't even begin to describe it.
I personally have not worked with it, but Latexki is a Wiki that is basically a latex-rendering frontend for a SVN server.
So it can do the entire latex syntax, and you can either submit changes by wiki or by SVN.
What it lacks, and what made me go for mediawiki, were the missing advanced interface features for editing, such as editing only a section of a document.
If you have seriously non-technical users, skip LaTeX because the syntax is "hard". LyX might hide some of that complexity, but (at least the last time I tried it about a year or so ago) it is incredibly buggy. Word 2007 and OpenOffice both have good equation editors, and in Word 2007's case, you can use LaTeX-style commands to enter equations in.
The problem with version control is that it only solves the versioning part of collaboration; typically you want to suggest changes or make comments on the document, and Word performs this quite well with its Track Changes and Commenting features. I believe OpenOffice has such a feature as well. The main shortcoming it has is that you still have to come up with a way to determine which copy of the document is the canonical one.
With LaTeX, I don't have to worry that the latest word processor won't open older files. I can store it in text and send it as text.
Word processors are just inferior.
The biggest mistake I see is that browsers did not did not adopt a TeX-like standard for formatting both formulae and text.
I personally have not worked with it, but Latexki is a Wiki that is basically a latex-rendering frontend for a SVN server.
So it can do the entire latex syntax, and you can either submit changes by wiki or by SVN.
What it lacks, and what made me go for mediawiki, were the missing advanced interface features for editing, such as editing only a section of a document.
Um, the framers of the Constitution knew that if it was static it wouldn't be adequate forever. That's why they included the amendment process. However, since the amendment process requires that you actually get a national consensus- which you need if your constitution is to be legit- abusers of power in all three branches of government have been fond of either ignoring the fact that their actions are unconstitutional or just reading the Constitution as "it says whatever I say it means." That's what the idea of a "living constitution" boils down to- a ploy to subtly force constitutional changes down people's throats without the required supermajority and to take power away from the people and the states and place it in the hands of despots in all three branches of the federal government.
A handful of the thousands of examples: the supposed right of Congress to grant copyright for unlimited times (Eldred v. Ashcroft) and the supposed "right to privacy" are obviously not constitutional. Clauses which are in the Constitution are abused by deliberately misconstruing them to mean something entirely different: the Commerce clause and General Welfare clause are abused to expand legislative power, while the restriction on "cruel and unusual punishment" (which is there to prevent singling out individuals to give them harsher penalties than everybody else, not to say the people of the individual states can't pass draconian laws) is abused to allow judges to legislate from the bench and import other nations' inclinations regarding punishment.
What is this for a lame /. article!?!?!?!?!?!
LyX already comes with integrated Subversion support. Go to File/Version Control. You just need to have svn installed on your system and have a document under version control opened.
... and I've only seen a handful of people that actually used LaTex. That handful definitely swear by it - but a standard? Not even close. It doesn't matter the age of the scientist - most of those I've known are using Word, for better or for worse.
FWIW the journals Nature and Science are THE giants for many areas of scientific endeavor, and both of them prefer Word-formatted documents. They will also accept ps/eps as well as pdf though.
#DeleteChrome
Rather than version control as such, when our group writes at the same time (we use latex), we use SubEthaEdit to write actually collaboratively. It's a serious step up from version control. Requires a little more trust, but that's fair enough in co-writers.
mods are slacking today. Lyx looks great, and addresses the article well.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
As a grad student in public health, the Word/Endnote combo is definitely standard, and no one I know uses (or has likely even heard of) LaTex. Being a poor grad student, Zotero has been very attractive and has performed quite well thus far.
However, to me, the larger question to be answered is why does each journal have their own style for citations? Is there really a need for the 3000+ styles that Endnote supports? I really believe that NIH, CDC, and other major funders should demand that citation styles be reduced to a set of maybe 10. How many hours and days are wasted every year by authors having reformat their citations just to resubmit their articles to another journal?
You're right, the default LaTeX settings are ugly. If you take a look at those older math/physics/compsci textbooks which were professionally typeset before LaTeX came out (e.g. math books in the McGraw-Hill "International Series in Pure and Applied Mathematics", Academic Press, Addison-Wesley), they just look so much better than LaTeX with the Computer Modern fonts. To this day I do not understand how anyone can think that the Computer Modern fonts look good. When I do use LaTeX I *always* switch to other fonts (usually New Century Schoolbook for text and either Fourier or txfonts for math). It's still not as good as the old books, but it's much better than the default.
I first got turned on to LaTeX here on Slashdot, in my earlier days of being an academic. Some people said "oh yeah, serious journals all use LaTeX."
Bull.
I think that what they meant, and what the summary means, is that engineering and CS journals use LaTeX. Never once have I found a journal in linguistics or psychology (the fields I work in) that had even heard of it. Good job that I found it clunky and stupid to work with, bringing no more to the table than styles in any word-processing program, and making shitty looking documents to boot (I once had a stats course and the teacher had written the book in LaTeX--I could see through his terrible, though correctly-formatted, prose to the LaTeX inside--i.e. it looked amateurish and distractingly ugly, like most things pure-class engineers do--and that includes most of my friends, so I'm just saying).
In fact, in my field, I'm on a constant campaign to introduce people to styles. These people know about cognitive load and semantic networks; they don't know that they can just mark a string of text "Heading" and be done with it. It's not their area of expertise. And yet it seems that many academic Slashdot readers think they are using--or should use--or even can use--LaTeX? It's laughable! And it's not even a very good idea.
Here's what most journals I've dealt with take in these fields: Microsoft Word. That's basically it. You could probably send an RTF, but only after showing that it could open in Word.
Standard in academic writing... Ugh. The hard sciences are hardly the only fields in academia. I won't defend the intelligence of those in nonsense fields like literature (full disclosure: unfortunately, I have a BA in this BS), but the soft sciences have a lot of very smart, very analytical people... who do not use LaTeX or anything like it.
Real men use troff+ms+eqn+pic+tbl+grap+refer:
groff -G -p -t -e -R -ms
Use latexdiff to highlight changes:
Latexdiff example
(Disclaimer: I'm the creator of that webpage.)
This isn't a news item at all; the solution as suggested by the Ask Slashdot questioner:
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)"
already exists. As detailed in the release notes to LyX 1.6, LyX supports SVN version control already.
Two points.
(1) You can customise all the layout elements of LaTeX to suit your own style. That includes margins, fonts, heading styles, line spacings, widow/orphan control, headers/footers and kerning. I agree that the default settings are pretty ugly, although I'd argue that the output still looks incomparably better than MS Word!
(2) Do you really want to spend the time and money using professional typesetting software on every document you produce? If you're writing a book, a publishing house will take care of all that for you in any case.
LaTeX output looks better than anything else available to the home user that I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it's close enough for most of us.
Here's my situation: I'm in a social sciences department and I'm the only one who knows that LaTeX is not a condom, that svn is not a pharmacy, and they don't sell carpets in bzr... So I write my stuff up on LaTeX & save the version with bzr, do latex2rtf, then rtf to doc with my wife's MSOffice bc I need to make sure formatting is ok, then send that to my advisor. My advisor does that crappy "track" shit, which seldom works reliably enough with OOo. So I open it up in my wife's Mac, and cry... Then I put her laptop (with the doc open w/ its tracking info & comments) besides mine (with tex open in emacs+auctex), and cry some more.
I only wish LaTeX was not so much easier than MSOffice & OOo...
was not sarcasm :'(
the choice isn't between LaTeX and 1930s typesetting, it's between LaTeX and Microsoft Word
There's also Adobe FrameMaker, which beats both LaTeX and Word.
it's close enough for most of us
Speak for yourself. The user base for LaTeX is minuscule compared to Word's. The typical "home user" uses Word. Even in academia, Word is steadily replacing LaTeX. Math departments and a handful of others are the remaining holdouts. The engineering departments at my university have mostly moved to Word, and even the physics department has gone from 100% LaTeX to about 50-50 with Word. Journals that used to insist on LaTeX now accept Word, and many now require Word.
LaTeX is outdated and in serious decline, but its proponents keep sticking their fingers in their ears and saying la-la-la-la-la. What software like LaTeX is running into is the same shift in thinking seen elsewhere, namely: "easier" trumps "better". While LaTeX may be technically better than Word (though Word proponents would argue that Word has caught up in the last few years), many don't view it as being "better enough" to bother with the fairly steep learning curve when Word, despite its deficiencies, is "good enough". This shift happened in industry a while ago, and it's now starting to seep into academia.
I suspect LaTeX will become even more marginalized than it already is.
I can't tell you whether to use Latex or some other writing platform. Personally, I use Latex. It's what I wrote my (math) dissertation in, and it is what I use for the courses I teach. I recommend that my math students become acquainted with it, because it is the standard in our academic domain.
What I can say is that if your document is large, you should use version control, whether you have collaborators or not. I used CVS for my dissertation, and I wasn't collaborating with anyone but myself. It made it devastatingly easy to have full revision histories both at work and at home. No losing _my_ work because the building burned down (that totally happened to some English students during my tenure as a grad student).
Most important though, I wrote faster because I had a history. I knew that if I screwed up my document I could go back step by step and get valid versions. If I gave a copy to my advisor, I could keep working and when he had comments ready for me 3 days later or a week later, I could pull up that specific revision to compare. I can say that revision control was possibly the difference between finishing and not finishing.
If I were to do the same thing today, I would use git for the same reasons that some of the earlier posts cite. One, it fixes many of the little things that are broken with CVS. But the big thing in my opinion is disconnected work. My pattern of work was usually to write for several hours (often disconnected from the net) and then connect and submit my work. With git you can write and commit work without a net connection, and sometimes you want to commit as you are working (whether there is a net connection or not).
It is also trivial and fast to make branches and move back and forth between them. Branching at the versions my advisor had is very fast and convenient with git.
So use revision control of some kind. It has tangible benefits.
LaTeX is outdated and in serious decline, but its proponents keep sticking their fingers in their ears and saying la-la-la-la-la.
Sure. I'm a so-called "proponent" of LaTeX, I guess because it's the easiest, quickest, and most complete way to write my documents. I'll be a "proponent" of Word when it allows me to write my articles quicker than LaTeX. I learned it quickly and I think it's a good tool. No religious war needed here.
The premise of this entire thread is wrong. . . MS Word is the standard of science writing. Saying it is LaTex (except in a few hard sciences) is just total BS. --AnonAmos
http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2007-3/scharrer/scharrer.pdf is an article on it.
I hate Scientific Workplace, but it pretty much cuts out the learning curve period.
A wiki that supports latex might work, but that's bleh (esp for papers, etc.)
Personally, I deal with it manually.
I'm writing a substantial work in pod (perl's doc format) using git for vc at the moment, with 5 authors.Works fine, painless, reviewing changes is easy and everything is pretty low friction. Plain text is so much easier to work with than anything else I've ever come across.
So move over to academic work, I find word's track changes a pain to work with, especially with more than 1 other author compared to good old diff -u.
So I'm going to try to write my next big work with Pandoc using citeproc and Zotero for citation and collection management. I'll get back to you in three years time to tell you how it went.
I'm afraid I don't entirely see where you're coming from. LaTeX is not showing its age in lack of version control (indeed, many recently-developed software packages have none), it's showing its philosophy. LaTeX has plain text source files, not some special format, which has many advantages and disadvantages. These files have to be managed externally, such as by subversion, as you note. Both LaTeX and subversion are nerd-friendly and have some learning curve issues.
LyX...I do not think is a good option. As someone gets deep into it, they are going to hit advanced issues as they want to do various things. Howeverâ"unlike straight LaTeX usersâ"they have no experience navigating LaTeX syntax to enter stuff. I suspect that people too early hit problems with LyX, and this has been what I've discovered helping people with their documents.
If the learning curve isn't worth it for your application, the other option is Word, I suspect.
I hear that Word now has a good deal of version control features (should be lots about them in this thread and plenty of other places), maybe not quite up to what you want, but up to some level. More importantly, you say this is academic writing and if you're going to submit stuff to conferences or journals, most require Word or LaTeX, and in my field at least all journals and many conferences allow either.
Something more obscure isn't going to be worth it. I'd really want to go with LaTeX because, well, I'm a big fan, but if you don't, using System X that no one's ever heard of isn't a great alternative.
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/
In the fall I submitted my M.Sc. in Physics with a 130pg document, 5 chapters, and 200+ references. Any sane person wouldn't even think about attempting such a feat in MS Word. The quality of the typesetting can't be beat, nor the beautiful vectorized graphics. Yes I spent 3 weeks hacking my school's awful template into a thing of beauty, but I've now enabled my colleagues to simply use my template outline and \include each of their chapter .tex files. *poof* They now have a thesis that is both beautiful, and perfectly formatted to my school's very strict guidelines. I'm going to be keeping it for my Ph.D, that's for sure.
Almost every single science or engineering journal I've read or submitted work to has used Latex. They will often accept manuscripts in Word, but they end up paying an editor to move it into their Journal's Latex template which usually costs an extra submission fee. Yes, I know a number of the "soft sciences" don't require Latex submission. But if the journal is serious about keeping formatting continuity between articles, editions, volumes, they will definitely typeset the final copy in Latex. All of the top ranked journals like Science or Nature typeset in Latex.
For the people on here saying that they've never seen or heard of Latex still being used: Have you ever read a textbook, specifically one with more than one formula? It was probably typeset in Latex. A number of Douglas Coupland books are also typeset in latex (you can tell by the chapter layout template). If you read a document that looks beautiful and pleasing to the eye, it was probably made in Latex.
Just because you haven't used it to create a document, it doesn't mean that everyone else is as unfortunate. Like most things in life, the learning curve can be steep, but the rewards are bountiful.
All those replies and not one mention of XML as a candidate replacement for Latex? I'd have thought that more than one output format would have tempted a few people to consider docbook XML source as a reasonable option. The arguments about the campus 'elders' not wanting to change rings true, although XML offers so much more today than Latex.
How exactly is LaTeX is showing its age? Has how to write $x^2$ really changed that much? Is there a better way to write that? Or is it just that the point and click generation are scared of, ooooo, formatting text without clicking? How scary...
Seriously, if someone calling themselves an Academic is adverse to learning something as trivial as LaTeX (seriously, basic usage isn't difficult nor hard to learn) or learning the two or three commands to use SVN/CVS/etc (let's be honest, it really is that few commands for basic usage and the IT department can set-up the repo if need be), then they are NOT an academic.
But, I should point out that only beyond the fundamental sciences (generally speaking) there *might* be enough collaborators to justify such a system. Because, for the fundamental guys, a mailing list would be good enough. And even then, its not really needed.
I think that it should also be pointed out that it is rarely a situation in academic writing where the paper can be written in parallel. What really happens is that the collaborators send there notes to the most junior member of the team and that person writes it up. Then the paper is sent off to the others and people discuss the changes that they think need to happen. Rise, repeat.
It might be a nice thought that the open-source model can be applied to research and/or academic writing. But, the fact of the matter is that it can't. Software can be written in a very modular fashion enabling good parallelism in development. But, academics is very one step after the other. One idea leads to the next and each idea can only really be discussed before the one person writes it up. That's really what happens in real life. Discussions and people working in there own offices. Then someone will figure something out and that will lead to another discussion about its correctness, etc and things then move on from there.
Seriously, real research isn't figure out A, then B, then C and three people go on to figure out there respective parts and combine the results. It's more like, they might (at most) *think*, A, then B, then C. But, it ends up being G, then D, then C. Or C might not be the conclusion at all.
Research cannot be planned and then worked on like software can. Software is a known quantity. One knows the building blocks and generally how to put it together before things are started. That might change in the planning phase, or possibly the development phase as well. But, not significantly, and not materially. Research on the other hand (i.e. academics) is full of unknowns. The best that can be said in the beginning is that there is a *possible* path. But, that is pretty much guaranteed to change as progress is made and the end result(s) might change as well. In fact, a lot (if not most) of the time, the end result isn't known. It's being sought after.
So, how exactly is that supposed to be parallelised again? You know, when the solution and its path isn't known?
MathML has existed for years, so has SVG and still their support in the browsers is very bad.
HTML + MathML + SVG + CSS would be very good for writing WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) articles.
You could even switch between visual editing and editing the code easily.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
...not sure how it performs with formulas/coding, but with text and narrative content, "Writeboard" works great:
http://www.writeboard.com/
I am prepared to believe that LaTeX is better than Word, or anything else on the planet. But I think an important issue here is not what the poster thinks is best, but what his community thinks is best.
The very fact that the question is being asked suggests the poster is a junior member of their community. Which means that they'll need to fit in with the senior members of the community or not get accepted and invited to join in collaborations.
So they need to bear in mind what the current preference is amongst the senior professors etc and fit in with them. Maybe if they've got the time and energy they can embark on persuading their professors to dedicate time and energy to changing to LaTeX but they got to be pragmatic. As a PhD student I can tell you that you're grateful enough sometimes that you can get time from your busy supervisors to have them read your document drafts in their favoured formats.
The thought of handing in a draft to a senior academic in a format they can't use and saying "I'd like you to read and contribute to this and by the way learn to use a better software package, stupid!" doesn't bear thinking about... :-)
It must be remembered that Word and it's relatives are only word processors. If you want to combine documents and images and have proper styles and typograpic control, use a layout program. InDesign is the best of the bunch, I have used it for numerous publications and have not found anything it can't do.
As for collaboration, InDesign will use WebDAV and will auto-update linked documents.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
I've had a similar question for Hydrographic Offices in various countries that have to produce Coast Pilot/Sailing Directions documents. Except in their case, this is a document that has 100+ years of revisions and is looking to 100 more years. How do we get them into a process where they can track all the changes and reference where material was submitted from?
I tried to think through some of the options for this kind of stuff here:
Managing distributed XML document editing for nautical publications
might probably be a better choice for certain tasks than Latex is. there is just one big problem i have with it: windoze. i never used anything else than Linux (yeah, exactly! no dual booting inbreed here;)) and will not start with this shit because of one questionable application. where is the problem with version control? mercurial or git should do the job well, at least it's darn good for everything else...
It is less hassle to use a distributed version control system such as Git or Bazaar. It also helps to split up the work into several files where each author is primarily working on one of them and use include-statements in the master file. I also recommend to maintain a "Makefile" which takes care of running bibtex, converting SVG to EPS, creating renderings with POVRay, ... so that a single "make" on the command line will update the document.
If you just want to write a draft, you could try a distributed editor such as Gobby.
"software wiki latex git askslashdot education"
this is a Computer Supported Collaborative Work question...
TWiki.net kicks out all contributors...
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/29/146201
also, the comments about the lack of security-sense in the coding...
I don't know if TikiWiki has the math capability, but why aren't people suggesting http://darcs.net/ as a back-end, instead of SVN?
I think you are too focused on the technology. You need first to focus on effective collaboration, which is messy, involves multiple inputs, and takes time. There are different kinds of software that allow for collaboration and support the writing process.
Currently popular is the wiki, similar to Wikipedia, that allows multiple authors to create a single document, etc. Knowledge Forum is software specifically designed for collaborative knowledge work, and contains multiple forms of support for both collaboration and the writing process. After collaboration and creation of the text form of the document, it is relatively simple to format the document in any one of a number of programs. Focus on effective collaboration first.
I am a scientist, I did my PhD six or seven years ago, and I am the author of several publications in the fields of molecular biology, molecular evolution and bioinformatics. I have had several collaborations, I used LaTeX and I used Word. Here are a few remarks. Baseline is that there is no real collaborative system out there.
(i) LaTeX
1) It is not true that LaTeX use is limited to CS, Physics and Mathematics. Biologists use it as well, and many journals in the field at least accept LaTeX. Some even prefer it.
2) That said, LaTeX *is not* a collaborative writing tool. It is a typographic system. The fact that it produces nice output is of no relevance when preparing a manuscript that will be converted to whatever system the publisher uses and will look quite different from your version.
3) While it manages a lot of things quite well, collaborative efforts are a pain in the ass. Even if you work together with a savvy scientist, unless the person is an actively working programmer, and uses the same version control system as you do, things like SVN, CVS etc. are not an option. Even though I collaborated with several people who know well how to program, setting up CVS for manuscript creation does not work out. In the end, you revert to writing "%XXX modified by JW3" in your LaTeX source.
(ii) Word
1) most of the experimentally working biologists use Word; some of them use Endnote. Whatever system you intend to use, it must be compatible with people working with Word.
2) the collaborative features of Word are quite well, but not perfect. Versioning can be tough and figures can be a problem. Endnote is not bad for bibliography... assuming that all collaborators use it the same way and have the same databases -- which is unrealistic.
3) manuscripts produced by Word are ugly. Fullstop.
4) if the collaborators use different versions of Word, the result can be a mess.
Some more general remarks.
(i) Bibliography.
The current situation with bibliography is ridiculous, but the fault is at the editorial office side. The authors are supposed to painstakingly follow the bibliography guidelines of the journal, take care of all the interpunction and formatting. True, BibTex or Endnote can take care of most of it, but not all. At the same time, for 99% of the cited sources it would be sufficient to just give the doi (www.doi.com) id or pubmed id or something similar. And it should be the job of the bloody editor to take care of it -- I mean, as an author, not only I don't get any money for my publications, not only I actually have to pay for the additional or color figures or even the publication itself, I also have to (a) pay for the actual research with taxpayers money and (b) do 90% of the editorial job myself! If my English is not acceptable, will it be corrected by the office? No, in most of the cases it will just be rejected by the reviewers.
(ii) What I envision is a fuson between Dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) and some sort of clever versioning system that would allow the people to use their Word or LaTeX or whatever to upload and version files. It would have to take care of figures and bibliography as well. And... THERE IS NO SUCH THING YET OUT THERE.
j.
Yes - as is pointed out below, LaTeX is only the standard in technical fields. I'm in education/psychology, and Word is definitely the standard, and Track Changes is used constantly. It is completely expected that you will pass a document around and it will accumulate a variety of colored edits and little comments to the side. This is even how many profs and TAs prefer to grade papers (I don't really prefer it, but was expected to do it this way by the prof I TAd for).
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
What type of academic setting are you in? Hollywood upstairs medical college? Seriously, the learning curve for latex is a maximum of 1 week of steady use. And if memorizing svn update and svn commit is still too taxing, tortoise provides a GUI that ties right into windows explorer (Note: the assumption that you use windows is probably valid if you are afraid of both latex and svn). Why look to re-invent the wheel when latex+subversion is already a stellar choice for what you want to do.
It sounds like http://www.scribtex.com/ could be exactly what you are looking for. It's an online LaTeX editor that allows direct rendering to PDF along with most of LaTeX's other nice features. It allows for collaborative editing and it's pretty easy to share documents with other users. It's also revision controlled with the ability to revert to previous versions, although not quite as powerfully as svn or git, etc.
If I had to write a book or manual these days then I might consider checking out Scribus and git first.
Nice and easy for everyone to understand - even my work colleagues who mostly don't even know what Linux is - because there's no significant markup and it looks good even in plain text.
Convert to Latex if you need to - or HTML - I go straight to PDF with the wonderful rst2pdf.
Embed Latex markup in it easily too.
The question was raised a few months ago in a post at Academic Productivity and obtained a lot of valuable answers and suggestions in the comments.
Depending on the complexity of your layout, I'd recommend, not LaTeX itself for the main collaboration, but one of the lightweight markup languages which is at least capable of footnotes, and possibly has a usable mechanism for citations.
This way you have a relatively simple, plain-text markup to learn, which can easily be thrown into git or another vc system. (Try a paid github account, for example).
Pandoc (using citeproc) was mentioned above. It's basically just Markdown with some refinements. The Citeproc part is new, but shows promise as a modern BibTeX replacement, and could be used with Zotero (which itself will get collaboration features, but not until the 2.0 version---which is to say not for a while yet).
Pandoc also allows LaTeX passthrough, so you could make use of BibTeX, which at this point has many more users, and most of the persistent problems solved.
The other lightweight markup languages with decent support for the needs of academic writing include MultiMarkdown, and ReST.
I'm doing my own thesis in org-mode in Emacs, which is working nicely so far. It's also a lightweight markup language with LaTeX passthrough, and a great interface for things like footnotes and document structuring. That said, it's not something you'd introduce a whole team of writers to. It's Emacs after all, which is still a bit of an adventurer's editor.
Check out www.scribtex.com. A collaborative online latex editor with complete revision history.
I think that some of these online backup programs sync automatically and store the revision history -- pretty sure that dropbox does and it's dead easy to install and use. You could set up a new account and share the login and password with your coauthors.
I agree with others that if you can use latex, certainly you can master svn. The latex+svn combination is the best I've found for collaboration and well worth the time to learn.
That said, one issue I find extremely annoying is the so-called "ineffective" change: whitespace in latex source that doesn't change the compiled document. Of course, any version control will see this whitepsace as a change. The rule of thumb is to avoid ineffective changes, but in a big collaboration, the whitespace issue results in too many conflicts. A clever use of svn hooks might get around this issue, but I haven't figured it out.
Firstly, contrary to some of the other posts, I'd strongly advise that if you're an academic then you should invest the time to learn LaTeX. When reviewing papers, it is obvious where LaTeX hasn't been used. I've seen both academic papers and books written in MS Word and they look terrible, usually they're full of formatting problems - especially with unusual characters such as mathematical symbols and tabular layouts. Your science might be great, but the document will look amateurish and this will be reflected in how people perceive your work, which matters a great deal in the peer review process. Some documents have been rendered unintelligible by Word problems.
Second point is that Kile is not given much attention as a LaTeX editor, but I've been using it to write papers and larger documents for a few years and have found it to be a great tool. Often I fix other people's LaTeX documents by importing them into Kile to quickly find and fix the problem. So I'd recommend you give it a go.
Third, as some other posts have mentioned, I'd stay away from SVN. I've been using it for a couple of years and recently I've found it to be seriously lacking when multiple users are working on the same files regularly. It's also not very robust - I've had some network problems (dropped packets) and SVN has been unable to cope. This has cost me days of time spent to fix the problems. I've heard some good things about git etc., so I plan to check them out, but at the moment I can't recommend them.
RS
Hello I think the closest what you are looking for is the noosphere software, which is the engine used by planetmath (You can test it) Uwe Brauer
Have you tried gobby?
it's close enough for most of us
Speak for yourself. The user base for LaTeX is minuscule compared to Word's.
I was replying to a poster who suggested that LaTeX output was inferior to published, typeset books from the 1930s -- my comment specifically related to the aesthetics of the printed output. I'm not sure how that led to a diatribe about LaTeX usability!
I agree with you that LaTeX usage is declining. But the sad thing is that with LyX, I can write with the speed and ease-of-use of MS Word (although I'd argue LyX is in fact easier to use), I can track changes on a collaborative document, use a far superior reference manager than Endnote and produce output that is beautiful to read. And it's all done (at work) on a Windows XP machine, installed from an installer exe, with no need to resort to different OSes or anything like that.
I'm not sure how that led to a diatribe about LaTeX usability!
I think it was your use of the word "us" in the phrase "most of us". You should have said "most of us LaTeX users".
I do not know if I would call LaTeX output "beautiful". I agree with the grandparent post that said books from the 1950s looked better than books typeset with LaTeX. It would be nice if the professional typesetting software used by many of the large older publishers were made available to the general public at a low or no cost, so that people would not have to bother with LaTeX or Word.
Use LaTeX and Gobby.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.