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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?"
...when you stand up and announce "What this group needs is some latex subversion. Excuse me while I whip this out..."
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.
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