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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.
Exactly. Our lab submitted a collaborative paper that involved five people editing the document. SVN was more than enough for our needs, and all you need is an Apache install running somewhere. It literally was painless because of SVN, just make sure everyone types in descriptive log messages. Bonus: the commit logs can help you determine the order of authors :)
On the frontend, the best SVN clients I've used are TortoiseSVN for Windows and RapidSVN for Linux. As I said, couldn't be happier with the setup. IMO, any more functionality is absolutely unnecessary.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Funny thing is, if one uses the styles in Word correctly, you get a WYSIWYM editor, just never, EVER touch the bold, italic, underscore button. And the sad thing is it's much, much easier to do this in word 2000 then in newer versions.
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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?
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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.
An ex-paramour of mine was a graduate student in Egyptology. Used to go on archaeological digs all the time. She could speak or read six languages fluently, several of them dead. When we went to see the touring collection of the British Museum she read the hieroglyphs on various artifacts to us as easily as you or I would read a street sign. She's since finished up her PhD. I'm certain she'll end up a department head at a top university someday. Very academic.
She also got lost driving to places she'd already been to several times, and couldn't understand how to calculate a 20% tip by doubling and moving the decimal point. Can't imagine her using LaTeX. or CVS. Not technical at all.
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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
Except that with that you have to control formatting, citations, spacing, margins... LaTeX, although obscure, enables you to focus on the *content*, rather than on the *presentation*. I write papers exclusively in LaTeX.
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These systems were designed with programming in mind, they compare files on a line by line basis.
They would be perfect for the job.
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.
And this is simply bull,
because % this is a comment
TeX makes it an ideal % maybe 'perfect is better'
tool % TODO: choose some other noun
to break a sentence into
segments % with comments!
which can illustrate
its structure. % yes, no apostrophe here!
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