Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.