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

EMACS OF COURSE!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Wow, as if someone had to ask. All you gotta do is...

Re:Word

[Daengbo]

Want a non-technical way to do it? Sign everyone up for Google Docs and work collaboratively, even in real time. If I were you, I would wait till the end of your collab to format stuff. Just download the final document as plain text and compile to PDF.