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:The standard?

[jsiren]

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.

Right. And I've never, ever seen anybody use the styles in Word correctly. I don't know why, but a great majority of people seem to use Word even worse than if it were a typewriter and a sheet of paper. The logic seems to be something like this:

For vertical space, press Enter. For page break, press Enter many times. For horizontal space, press space bar. For lots of horizontal space, press Tab. To make a heading, press the B button and find the right spot with the space bar. To make a table of contents, type each heading here, then a long string of points, then the page number. Remember to update each page number if you add or delete stuff in between. That box says something about styles, it's complicated, just leave it as it is.