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Fidus Writer: Open Source Collaborative Editor For Non-Geek Academics
johanneswilm writes "While writing my Ph.D in anthropology I found out it's almost impossible to get non-geeks to help me with editing my thesis because it was written in Latex. Lyx is almost there, but as it's not web based, it's difficult to use for online collaboration. Writelatex.com is online, but typing LaTeX code is a no-go for non-geeks. Google Docs is web based and near-WYSIWYG, but lacks support for professional print formats such as Latex. The Ph.D took longer than expected, so before finishing me and three others were able to code an entirely new editor: Fidus Writer: web based, open source (AGPL), almost-WYSIWYG and with tools for academics such as citation management and formula support and output formats PDF, Epub, Latex, HTML."
Tree isn't the same thing as three. Do your job or give up on it, jesus christ.
Tree others? Sounds like an interesting project.
LaTeX and online collaboration. What more can you ask for?
MonkeyTeX.
Sorry, why do you need to collaborate on a Ph.D. thesis? Genuinely curious, as when I did my Ph.D., the work was mine, the text was mine, and it was 10x faster for my advisor to make comments in pen.
Also... "The Ph.D took longer than expected"... hahaha... (a) of course; (b) so, you're American? (As many European countries have fixed Ph.D. lengths.)
Also... what is with people trying to make LaTeX WYSIWYG? That's like trying to make an interface for driving a car by giving the driver an R/C controller.
And finally... why do you need to collaborate on the text of a Ph.D.?
Why would it be a problem that LyX or other editors are not web-based? Just mail your document to your editors, have them mail their changed versions back, and if needed, keep track of everything in a local version control repository.
Oh wait, I think there's a typo in there somewhere -- sorry.
This might do the trick: http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/
Personally, I use LaTeX but for docs without many formulas pandoc works fine.
You don't need a special editor at all.
Why not just create your content in something that all of your non-geek friends are happy to use (Word with track changes, for instance) and then spend a short time formatting it when you're done writing?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Help with editing your thesis?
For my thesis I did have help - wrote everything out longhand, then had three department secretaries typing up various chapters. (This was all on IBM Selectrics with acid-free paper. Figures were outsourced to the Graphic Arts department, where professional artists did a much better job than the computer-generated junk of today.) Editing was done with liquid paper and glue.
What is this "Latex" thing?
While writing my Ph.D in anthropology I found out it's almost impossible to get non-geeks to help me with editing my thesis because it was written in Latex
is this really a surprise? seriously, why would you expect for someone someone that is doing you a favor to learn something that is alien to them?
Google Docs is web based and near-WYSIWYG, but lacks support for professional print formats such as Latex
ok, so you expected people to learn LaTeX but you can be bothered to reformat the page after someone edits it for you? WTF?
i understand you want peer review but people are putting in effort to help you. the very least you could do is to put in some effort to accommodate them in return. it's this kind of bullshit behavior that gives geeks like me a bad name. stop telling people there is/was nothing wrong with GIMP and that they are holding their phone wrong!
johanneswilm, you are ruining geekdom for the rest of us!
</rant>
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
One only uss Latex to create a PDF with it. The point is that Latex makes really beautiful PDFs. word, Libreoffice, etc. make PDFs, but they are not really nice looking enough to make a book of them.
This requires a Mac why? I'm pretty sure "Print to PDF" isn't an OSX exclusive feature.
... is why you write your thesis in whatever is the standard editor for your field. In the humanities and some sciences that's often Word; in mathematics / IT / etc it's usually Tex.
First you look at the journals in your field where you're likely to be published, then you choose an editor, and only then do you start properly writing your thesis.
(p.s. Most journals across most fields accept .pdf as a baseline - but you'll have fun when it comes to receiving back revisions, tracking changes, etc.)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Or did you just rely on some javascript library?
I think this is how girls feel when guys approach in the wrong way.
We've got a guy hawking editing software. He apparently has a problem with his 'h' key on his keyboard. That seems weird to me because I would think he would have to use that key quite often while coding. But even so, if the key isn't working properly and he's aware of it, you'd think he would look out for that while editing anything he writes (like the submission, and his website).
His responses in these threads seem really defensive (even where that isn't appropriate). But there's nothing really offered as a defense.
Add to that, you go to the website and the first thing you see is The Book of Mormon. Now, I'm not down on anyone's choice of religion, but that really weirded me out.
So anyway, I don't know WHAT is really going on here and I can't be bothered to figure it out. And I'm guessing that's how girls feel when they're creeped out by males using the wrong approach.
"word, Libreoffice, etc. make PDFs, but they are not really nice looking enough to make a book of them."
That's funny, since that's how most books are made these days.
Not Word, granted. But then I am a developer, and I have very few friends who have used Word for anything serious, for many years.
As the implementation of MathML in browsers currently isn't good enough for everyday use we use mathjax for that.
If the poster is sophisticated enough to be using LaTeX I would think he would realise that you shouldnt be editing and typesetting at the same time anyway. Edit in an editor. Once the editing is done, format it with LaTeX.
You can use any editor you want, although MSWord is probably the worst excuse for an editor you will find, it's still capable of spitting out text so it should work.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Simply put, if you are the only one editing the document and you are going to publish as a PDF the by all means use LaTex. BUT, if you are going to have anyone else look at the document then you have two choices: 1. Do it twice, once in the format the other person is comfortable with and then convert to LaTex. Or 2. Do it once in the format the other person is comfortable using.
I have personally fought this battle and I finally resigned myself to using MS Word. There is a reason MS is still in business... Everyone else uses their products even if you and I don't... Therefore, use MS Word... Get to know it... Learn to work around it's problems...
In the long run, my time is more valuable than trying to create a document twice.
It's better than climbing beneath the car and moving the steering rack by hand! Seriously, hand-editing of documents is extraordinarily unpractical without WYSIWYG feedback for at least 98% of all edits. Hand editing is for fine tuning only! And people wonder why LaTeX is so unpopular?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
It's not like you can't convert *TeX to some other format that can be reviewed by your colleagues. You know like PDF or *gasp* pain text. Then you just take their notes and use them to revise your thesis. Problem solved.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Tree isn't the same thing as three. Do your job or give up on it, jesus christ.
"me and three others" seems a little off as well.
I gave it a try, installed the source, followed the instructions, opened the page in a browser and... was greeted by an error message telling me it needed a 'Facebook app' or some other social drivel.
Facebook? Are they serious? I opened a bug report:
I thought to give Fidus a try by installing the source and following the directions. When I tried to log in to my freshly minted server it told me I couldn't because I had not configured a 'Facebook app'. Looking through the Django config page I noticed it only gives the options of using Facebook, Twitter and Google. Neither of these are acceptable in any environment which has even the slightest respect for an author's privacy and confidentiality.
Please make it possible to use Fidus using either a 'private' 'social' 'app' (lots of quotes there, for different reasons) or by foregoing on the social fad entirely. Since Fidus seems to be about getting work done I don't see the need for more 'social' distraction anyway.
--frank[at]unternet.org
The Latex-lab guys have LaTeX for Google Docs working very well. Our maths faculty use it all the time. See http://docs.latexlab.org/docs Source http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/
You can probably fix that H key in a few seconds by cleaning under it.
Also, as the AC said, if your work is sloppy, people will think your work is sloppy.
It's not exclusive to Mac applications. There are lots of applications from all major OSes that will do that. However, unique to Macs (as far as I know) is that it is built right in to the low-level printer-driver structure of the OS: anything on a Mac that will print at all, will also save to PDF.
Hey there!
Unfortunately, Fiduswriter currently only works on Google Chrome. We are working to provide support for Mozilla Firefox.
I'll be back then.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Linux and Windows have had PDF or PS printer drivers for ages.
Perhaps as an exercise in pain? Any word processor will do.
You managed to write your thesis and develop some software on the side without it being included in the thesis. Impressive management of funding and "real life" on the side.
Seeing that illustration of “The Book of Mormon” under a headline which stated that “Fidus Writer can now create entire books,” I assumed you were claiming that Joseph Smith “translated” it using Fidus Writer? I must confess, I was a trifle dubious.
(*) Just an important safety tip, to prevent you from waking up one day and finding out the hard way.
I mean WTF. "Google Docs is web based and near-WYSIWYG, but lacks support for professional print formats..." this is not 1980 when you needed a typesetter to run LaTex for an offset press. Now days any text rich processor will translate just fine into any professional printer.
Is this just an experiment in anthropology? Trying to get a bunch of smart (or semi-smart) folk into chatting about nothing.
Oh wait...it's just another Timothy submission.
Nothing to see here... just teenage antics.
It is a WYSIWYG editor for Windows.
I mean, really talk about lazy. You want your editors manually correcting your document files? Editors should be reading final hard copy and you making the corrections.
Sure, people might have to learn some new software. But people in academia are smart and should be able to handle that.
In the end you have achieved all goals. Collaborative writing; tables, equations, figures etc can all be produced independently; version control, branches off site backups...
Most people don't know how to use Word properly anyway which is why you often get to see such horribly organized documents.
LaTeX is quite simple for people to learn. In fact, in my experience, many people find it easier than learning some app because all they really need is a cheat sheet listing the commands. Looking at FidusWriter, it doesn't seem easier to me than Writelatex.
Hello, I've been writing books for close to 20 years. In addition, for most of the last decade, I've also been a co-maintainer of ~30,000 pages of technical documentation for a well-known family of Open Source software products (one of which is used on Slashdot's backend). This documentation is updated and re-published in toto on a daily basis, in about a dozen end-user formats.
If you're an author, then you're supposed to be writing meaningful content. This means that you should be concentrating on data and semantics.
Presentation and layout should not be your concern--leave this to the professionals (editors and layout people).
Otherwise, use DocBook XML and MathML to author your content, then transform to PDF, RTF, Word, HTML, or whatever end-user format(s) are required using the appropriate toolchain and transforms. There are heaps and heaps of XSLT stylesheets out there for this purpose. You can tweak these as desired/necessary, and it's at this stage--and not before--that you should be even the slightest bit worried about how things look.
If there is one thing that many years in this game have taught me, it's that futzing with presentation issues while you're trying to write merely serves as a huge distraction. And that it is counterproductive to reinvent the wheel for every writing project, which is what formats that munge together content and presentation at the expense of semantics invariably force you to do.
I know it's fashionable around here to disparage XML, but text + semantic markup + styles/transforms works very, very well for producing dense technical material that preserves semantics while providing an easy way to publish something that's pleasing to the eye. For the last 10 years or so, I've refused to use anything else for this purpose. I strongly encourage anyone who's planning to write anything over a few paragraphs in length to check it out.
As for collaboration--why do you even have to ask? Pick a revision control system and use it. Depending on the project and who I'm working with, this would be SVN or BZR for me, but there are many choices. Choose one of them.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I wrote my thesis in Orgmode and converted it to LaTeX when finished. Orgmode is an outliner for Emacs which supports plain text formatting (e.g., *bold*, /italics/, etc.), lists, tables, images, code block, and everything else you could wish for.
Since the file is plain text it is dead easy to edit. On the other hand, you have to use Emacs, so your non-geek friends are probably still out.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
You used a typewriter font for a web page about a modern page-layout program? And triple paragraph spacing?
What you have described is very much needed, but if you are sloppy in communicating, expect little popularity.
Actually it isn't most word documents are converted into plain text and then set using a text layout application. I have no idea what they are using now, in the olden days it was roff now it is probably some kind of wysiwyg text layout application, where you have precise control over character, line, block and image positions. This is even a better method than Latex since Latex is difficult to control when you want something specific visually.
The output of Latex is sometimes allowed by a publisher, since the output is pretty good, but I think they rather want to set the document themselves.
I wonder if Word output is used at any publisher, the output looks so incredibly unprofessional, that I do not think a publisher want to lower their reputation.
And yes you can see the differences quite clearly between Latex output and Word output, even if you are able to get all the margins and fonts the same, the difference will be startling. Latex moves letters and words around, make tiny changes in letter sizes, so it can make pretty text lines, and balance the greyness on the page. Word's simple setting, which can only change the spacing between words, will show a lot less balance in greyness. This is just one example.
"Linux and Windows have had PDF or PS printer drivers for ages."
Of course they have. But that's not the same thing. It doesn't come built into the OS.
Yea, the windows PDF and PS driver, those are pretty extreme hacks. You print to the PDF driver, the PDF driver after it has printed then shows a dialogue to save the document.
On OS X, the print dialogue will ask you where you want to save the document, and then it is 'printed'.
Actually I am pretty sure that the document created a PDF through the document drawing API, which is then printed. So the save to pdf bypassed the print system entirely.
Let me ask this: have you ever tinkered with Lilypond? It's basically LaTeX for music scores. It is renowned for its beauty. There's a reason why Musescore is trying to build a wysiwyg editor to emulate it. Then again, there's a reason people are composing using Musescore, and not Lilypond.
(And yes, Musescore is working on an output to Lilypond (experimental) which goes to my point... Why code the entire thing by hand instead of using an editor and then hand tweaking the result?)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
That's actually a feature of CUPS, which is available on any *nix-like system. It's not something special and magical that OS X can do.
actually its the other way around. it you understand TeX you get a feel for the expected result faster than it takes to describe in the language. An example, typesetting equations. You might find that you are using partial differential equations really often, in about three forms, lets say a partial symbol by itself, then given a single parameter partial over partial param1, and partial param1 over partial param2. Writing a macro in terms of composition takes two or so short lines. Allowing you to save \over{\partial{arg1}}{\partial{arg2}} with \p{arg1}{arg2}
start making lots of domain specific abbreviations in this way and you can concentrate on the content much more closely and the time that would be wasted with some sequence like;
take one hand off keyboard, find mouse, find cursor, move cursor to menu, select insert equation, click or double click object, find dialogue of floating equation options, find eq formatting subgroup, click eq formatting subgroup, find fraction item, click fraction item, move hand to keyboard, type first arg literally(probably not semantically concisely), take hand off keyboard, select next target cell of fraction box construct, move hand to keyboard, type second argument literally, take hand off keyboard, click back to the body of the document to continue return from the equation editing, move hand back to keyboard, now you are ready to continue where we could compare progress to latex.
this is a trivial example. now consider changing the format of the entire document from an article to a book, with proper rebuilt TOC, bib, page numbering and chapter and subsection page listings, all of that with a word. then turning it into an pdf based presentation with navigable structure, hyperlinked bib, styles, animated bullet points (through multipage structure).
latex is the only sane option when producing mathematics because you quickly understand that from proper pagination to spacing of content, let alone the adjustment of font and positioning in subtexts within subtexts among radical and every mathematical notation including large paren that bound several lines, tex looks better.
Perhaps as an exercise in pain? Any word processor will do.
I'd even go so far to state that I am pretty sure that any word processor will be vastly superior as an exercise in pain.
but for Google Chrome. FAIL
From the website: "Hey there! Unfortunately, Fiduswriter currently only works on Google Chrome. We are working to provide support for Mozilla Firefox."
I'm embarrassed for all the PhD students out there. " me and three others were able"
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Framemaker in structured mode is an alternative for technical and book publishing. It supports content management systems natively and is all XML under the hood in structured mode. Being Adobe and meant for professionals, it's fairly pricey as you can imagine. Lyx/Latex is a pretty decent alternative.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Two good options I'm surprised that haven't been mentioned are sharelatex https://www.sharelatex.com/ and a former rival (now subsumed into sharelatex) scribtex https://scribtex.com/ Both are a "Google Docs meets LaTeX" solution that work well for various settings. I've had good luck using them with student collaborators who may not want to learn all the ins and outs of LaTeX for a joint project but who can edit text, draw figures, etc. and learn at least some of LaTeX without just starting with a blank page. They work well with the main features being that they are TeX-aware and the collaborators can just edit online and then typeset to PDF online without having to install TeX, style files, BibTeX, various graphics packages etc. on their own machines. The "diff" capability and the "revert to version of July 15" features are great when working with less-than-expert-LaTeXers as there are inevitable screwups and it has served me well both for writing academic papers with students and for collaborating on research grant proposals with people who give blank stares when the word "github" comes up. It is a great improvement over the "one author has the token and people email each other the latest version" method that is quite common and usually results in a couple of screwups along the way.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
"That's actually a feature of CUPS, which is available on any *nix-like system. It's not something special and magical that OS X can do."
Technically, no it's not. Unless it's a new feature introduced just this year. Because PDF printing in CUPS is done via external pre-filters (like the one supplied by KDE) before being fed to CUPS.