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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?"
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.
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!
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
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.)
Or you could have just learned latex and saved yourself the hassle.
I recently switched to LaTeX after being a word user for some time. the Zotero firefox plugin makes citations easy, but nothing like LaTex. Latex wins hands down
...etc. These systems were designed with programming in mind, they compare files on a line by line basis. If you change a word SVN would replace the whole line which might be a whole paragraph. So when you do a diff, both the old and new paragraphs are shown and it gets difficult at times to know exactly what changed. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. But at the moment, I would stick with ooo.org & word for collaboration. Don't forget the comment feature which is important during collaboration
But I think word (and OOO.org for that matter) are better at collaboration, mainly because track changes is much more effecient than revision control systems like SVN, git, mercurial
Over time, im sure a project will spring up to deal with this problem.
You speak London? I speak London very best.
Do you have to work on the document at the same time, or do you mean something like track changes?
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.
I concur. It really isn't that hard. I think the most intimidating part is all the preamble stuff like \documentclass \includepackage, etc, etc. So, just get someone else's latex file, and replace whatever's between \begin{document} and \end{document} with whatever you want.
As you use it often enough, eventually you would know what the things in the preamble are for, and you can streamline your latex file. From a practical point of view, you don't have to make a most streamlined latex document from day 1. Chances are your computer is powerful enough to render the any difference in compilation time insignificant.
I personally find writing equations and symbols in LyX highly inconvenient. Moving my hand back and forth between keyboard and mouse is annoying.
But then again I am just speaking for myself, who only writes documents on mathematics and not other subjects.
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.
Biomedicine falls in between, into the raping the souls of the sick for money gap.
Actually, us researchers get raped by soulless governments, who underpay us, hate funding our research and yet still expect instant, observable and immediate heath outcomes.
But you were close.
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 don't think a many papers in mathematics use anything other than LaTeX these days. Most books are also in LaTeX. I'd guess the same is true about physics - just look here:
http://arxiv.org/
Half a million articles of pure LaTeX...