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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?"
Gobby collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
...when you stand up and announce "What this group needs is some latex subversion. Excuse me while I whip this out..."
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.
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)
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 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.)
Or you could have just learned latex and saved yourself the hassle.
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.
Find free books.
There's a lot to recommend Latex, and it wouldn't be unreasonable. That said, I have a hard time saying, for sure, yes. It probably depends on personal preference.
I'm a bit of a typography snob, so I like the things that Latex does that I don't know how to get Word to do. For instance, when typing in Word, when the line gets too long, it wraps. In Latex, the line breaks are not inserted by such a simple algorithm; perhaps breaking this line a little earlier will prevent a nasty break later. For more even more snobby examples, see here.
Another of Latex's benefits is its programmability; this will sometimes come in handy. If you look at the diversity of the Latex packages out there, it should become apparent what benefits this can have. It also means that it's a bit more complex.
Latex will do stuff like automatic table of contents too. For citations, there is Bibtex. I haven't used Zotero, but it's at least better than the experience I had of using a really old version of EndNote. Bibtex works pretty slick: you just put ~\cite{some-key} into your document, and it will look through the Bibtex database, find the reference marked {some-key}, put it into your bibliography, automatically number/name everything in the bibliography (using one of any number of styles), and insert the citation into the text of your document.
Finally, the fact that Latex works really well with version control because you can get reasonable diffs is almost a killer feature for me.
At the same time, I've also found that getting Latex to do stuff it wasn't built to do can often be a pain.
Also, if what you're doing is table-heavy, I might recommend you stay away; if you've ever hand-programmed in HTML and had to do tables and found it really annoying, you'll have the same problems with Latex.
Basically what it boils down to is that I think that Latex would be a reasonable choice for you, but I can't say with any certainty that it'd be a better choice than Word, or that Word would be better than Latex.