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?"

Comments

Re:why?

[caffeinemessiah]

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.