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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?"
Word has version control ;p
Seriously, LaTeX is great in part because of the fact that it's quite hard to do anything crazy so people stick with the defaults which look good.
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.
Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
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.)
Seems like someone could write a good gui to support latex and subversion or git.
Think Deeply.
...when you stand up and announce "What this group needs is some latex subversion. Excuse me while I whip this out..."
Yeah, it does.
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!
Try out M-x make-frame-on-display
True interactive collaborative editing with all the Emacs tools for version control, TeX editing and everything else.
(Don't blame me, I found out about it here on slashdot)
Latex has an \include statement, so split the sections up into separate files, so they don't have to deal with conflicts. That'll simplify svn usage quite a bit, at least until they start editing others' text, at which point you have bigger problems to worry about.
If they still can't handle it, then have them dedicate part of their funding to adding revision control to lyx.
While many prefer his Fantastic Four or the later Fourth World stuff for DC, I think Jack Kirby's early work on the Marvel monster books ranks among his most enjoyable. "Gobby, the Living Document" is a personal favorite -- although "Memo from Vornu" and "I Conference Called Zimvaxx" are also fine examples.
Breakfast served all day!
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
Subversion is awful for detached work: it must speak to the server to record changes. CVS is no better. git could work, since each person's local copy is a full working repository. It is also terrible about allowing you to flush accidentally recorded debris, or out-of-date branches that have had their files copied elsewhere. It is also about tracking changes from another repository, with their history. Frankly, Subversion needs to be entirely discarded except for those few projects that are like CVS and where the master server is critical for the 'trunk' codeline.
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.
Google docs is fine until you start dealing with anything different to a Mail on Sunday article. Forget equations and figures. And if google goes down like it has the last few weeks...
Apple's new web based system is alright for footnotes and things, and for comments, but for serious collaboration with merging different versions and edits, then you can forget it. (If someone from apple reads this, please add gawdamn ODF support to pages for the love of all things sacred).
I still end up using latex to render equations and slap them into the document as a tiff file. And last time I used pages to collaborate with M$ office users it messed up the footnote marks for institute addresses and I ended up installing the mac version of office anyway :S So lets rule out apple for the time being.
Lyx didn't support the styles and bibliography for the physics journals I was writing for last summer (phys rev, elsevier). Lyx is not a bad idea, is it ready?
Microsoft word + equations = hell on earth. And having just lost 2 weeks of my life dealing with micro$oft's APIs, circular help systems and automatic updates every 3 minutes, I threw the thing straight back at IT and vowed never to go there again. Someone else might be able to tell you how good the M$ online collaboration tools are, but it won't be me! ;-)
If your collaborators are like mine, they want to see a return to fortran and VMS. My current line of thinking is to try to coerce them into using latex instead of m$ word, and volunteer to be version control. Then use something like git on your own machine to merge all the different branches as they e-mail their changes back to you. For me it's the lesser of all evils.
When you actually come to submit you'll still have to jump through hoops to please the journal editors with figure file formats and stuff ("we want 4 gigs of EPS files please author") but the process of collaborating on the authorship will be a damn sight easier.
Good article subject though. You've hit on a topic that has been in my mind for the last few months too (sorry about the long reply!)
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Do you have to work on the document at the same time, or do you mean something like track changes?
What kind of LaTEX do you need to be writing? If it's just mathematics, and you're on linux or osx, you may want to consider LaTeXiT. It renders equations to pdf and image formats, one of which I know for sure you can embed in a google document. It also lets you maintain libraries of equations, so you can modify them later.
I used it recently, in conjunction with Apple keynote for the Mac. It was far easier to deal with just the math LaTEX subset, and only at points where I needed it. I imagine a non-technical audience may agree.
Laequed purports to do something similar for windows. Haven't tried it myself.
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
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?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The post reads: "By abstracting out the substance from the content, it becomes possible to focus heavily on the writing..."
Abstracting out the substance from the content?
You're one of those humanities folks, aren't you?
You can do a diff with an external program that deals with intraline in a less retarded way. ;-)
I'm actually not sure what there is available for running from the command line (though 'svn diff --diff-cmd' will let you run something other than 'diff', if you can find a command-line replacement), but a lot of SVN graphical front ends also have a graphical diff program, many of which will do this better. (They'll usually highlight the whole line, but then word-by-word changes in a darker shade of red/green.)
Also very awesome is latex-diff. This takes two versions of a document, and marks changes in it using latex markup. You then pass the result through latex, and the result is a PDF that looks like what you get from an old version of Word or (current version of; this is one area it's far behind Word) Open Office Writer with track changes on.
I would really like to hear your distinction between academic and technical people.
When I was in school, I didn't leave the engineering building much. But my understanding is that there were other buildings at the school where people studied non-technical things like business, English, political science, and communications.
I even heard rumors that there were even women in those buildings, but I was not prone to falling for such wild claims. /s
Seriously, once you get out of math, engineering, and physical science disciplines, "latex" is what condoms are made of and "La-Tech" would be a French computer company. At the school I worked in, most of the engineering profs were happy using word. Only one was a serious LaTeX user (and he was definitely "technical"... he used to write liquification simulations in post-script and send them to be processed by the printer because its postscript engine was faster at floating point math and vectors than his 386 with math coprocessor!).
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.
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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.
It looks like MediaWiki already supports some TeX:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula
This will reportedly be possible next year with Office 14.
If you are still using Word for whatever reason, and want several-people-in-the-document collaboration in Word today, you can try my plutext collaboration software - see http://dev.plutext.org/blog/
You get paragraph level versioning, and changes tracked properly.
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.
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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I've done research and writing at federal institutions, private and state universities and commercial concerns, collaborated with people and labs in a dozen or so countries, and submitted to journals in several different fields. Never once did I hear LaTex mentioned as something available to write with or as a format acceptable for manuscript submission. I happen to be familiar with LaTex due to years of Linux tinkering, and from working with people who also happened to be at least modestly capable with it. Even so I'd use something that didn't require concern with command/control syntax. My brain is better used on the science and language syntax.
Microsoft Word can track changes according to collaborator. A particular format need only be created once, then saved as a template, many of which are available for download. There are various referencing packages that merge well with Word. I have run across other researchers who preferred something else for writing, but never have I run across one who did not have Word available or was not adequately familiar with it.
Perhaps there are fields I've not worked in that allow use of LaTex for writing and submission. I'll bet there are none that require it, and Word is acceptable to most if not all.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/latex4ling/journals/ is a short article listing LaTex friendly journals. I disagree with the assessments about Springer and Elsevier, as every one of their journals I've written for did not list LaTex as acceptable. That leaves a very short list of journals that do accept it (and two major publishers that do not accept it). The list is a lot shorter than just the list of >35,000 journals referenced by NIH/National Library of Medicine's PubMed, the database I'm most familiar with.
Mod me down if you must for dropping the *nix flag and waving the enemy's, but these are the observations of a trained observer.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
TWiki has some extension for LaTeX/MathML...
There is a Perl script named latexdiff (in CPAN I believe) that does color-highlighted diffs of LaTeX files. The output is another LaTeX file, so it must be run through LaTeX. The resulting PDF is useful for showing changes to your collaborators.
I use Emacs + git + LaTeX + latexdiff. I usually send the LaTeX input file and both the PDF and the diff PDF to my collaborators.
Word and OOo may show the diffs nicely, but as version control systems they are total disasters. Try using a Word file that has been through dozens and dozens of revisions in eight or nine writers' Word installations, which are of various versions and some are on Macs. Several times we have ended up converting the final version of the document to ASCII and re-formatting it in Word. It was the only way to restore sanity.
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
(La)TeX is widely used in Math, Computer Science, Physics, and some areas of engineering. It is also used by a subset of linguists. The great majority of people that I know in the humanities and social sciences have no idea what LaTeX is. They use MS Word (many with nostalgia for WordPerfect), or sometimes, e.g. in East Asian Languages, Nisus Writer. I myself have done almost all of my writing for many years in TeX. (That's TeX, NOT LaTeX.) I've written certain things recently using OpenOffice.org, in some cases because it was more convenient but mostly because all too many publishers and editors insist on MS Word.
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!
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Rather than version control as such, when our group writes at the same time (we use latex), we use SubEthaEdit to write actually collaboratively. It's a serious step up from version control. Requires a little more trust, but that's fair enough in co-writers.
I can't tell you whether to use Latex or some other writing platform. Personally, I use Latex. It's what I wrote my (math) dissertation in, and it is what I use for the courses I teach. I recommend that my math students become acquainted with it, because it is the standard in our academic domain.
What I can say is that if your document is large, you should use version control, whether you have collaborators or not. I used CVS for my dissertation, and I wasn't collaborating with anyone but myself. It made it devastatingly easy to have full revision histories both at work and at home. No losing _my_ work because the building burned down (that totally happened to some English students during my tenure as a grad student).
Most important though, I wrote faster because I had a history. I knew that if I screwed up my document I could go back step by step and get valid versions. If I gave a copy to my advisor, I could keep working and when he had comments ready for me 3 days later or a week later, I could pull up that specific revision to compare. I can say that revision control was possibly the difference between finishing and not finishing.
If I were to do the same thing today, I would use git for the same reasons that some of the earlier posts cite. One, it fixes many of the little things that are broken with CVS. But the big thing in my opinion is disconnected work. My pattern of work was usually to write for several hours (often disconnected from the net) and then connect and submit my work. With git you can write and commit work without a net connection, and sometimes you want to commit as you are working (whether there is a net connection or not).
It is also trivial and fast to make branches and move back and forth between them. Branching at the versions my advisor had is very fast and convenient with git.
So use revision control of some kind. It has tangible benefits.
You either lack typographic taste or have seen some bad documents. It is certainly possible to make an ugly document with LaTeX, but it's quite impossible to make a well-typeset document with Word.