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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.
Especially when you look at the Fidus Writer logo... I'm sure people will be hounding them for weeks!
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.?
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?
not really.Booktype cannot do Latex, nor citation management, nor formulas, nor footnotes nor any of the other things academics need. But Booktype has recently obtained better looking PDF output. I programmed the javascript part of that. Check http://bookjs.net/
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.
... 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?
The problem is that mailing docs around is a nihtmar when dealing with more than two people. "Who has the last version?" I tried a combination of Lyx and Dropbox, but also that was borderline too difficult and I needed to perform te installation myself for each person participating in it.
Yes, my contribution is this very program. The reformatting is a LOT of work. If people use MsWord, Libreoffice or alike, it cannot be done automatically.
How do you know that he expected them to learn LaTeX? Were in the summary and the linked ./ article does he write that?
"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.
You are right, I never did that. I expected there to be tools to handle this type of situation. I looked... and found nothing quite satisfying. Which is why Fidus Writer was started.
No one has to know LaTeX to edit a LaTeX document. It's the simplest possible thing to do other than editing plain text. Just edit the text and leave the commands alone.
On the other hand, if it's in Word or some other strange format, strangers can and will mess it up by editing it. Most word processors do not discourage editors from tweaking styles and layouts and the look and indentation and whatnot. WYSIWYG is the enemy of good writing.
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
Perhaps as an exercise in pain? Any word processor will do.
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.
I didn't get that from the summary. What I learned was that the Ph.D. took longer than expected to finish johanneswilm and others. I hope they paid her well.
(*) Just an important safety tip, to prevent you from waking up one day and finding out the hard way.
I have 16 books (my second college textbook comes out shortly), 4 peer reviewed journal articles, and over 2,500 published articles to my credit. I can work with latex, but no one I collaborate with does, making latex more than useless to me. I write in word. It just works. Yes, you have quarks to work with, but they are well known.
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.
Yes, you have quarks to work with, but they are well known.
And, luckily, there are only six known types.
You're implying here that Microsoft's products here are only better due to their user base. That's not quite fair. The way Word allows leaving document comments, reviewing them, and even directly accepting edits is the best workflow for review around. Even OpenOffice trails pretty far behind in this area, the UI isn't nearly as slick. There's nothing I'm aware of that allows a similarly powerful editor feedback cycle for formatted documents. As a full time developer / part time writer, I'm fine with using a version control system for handling LaTeX diffs, treating proposed review changes like a source code branch merge. But even with full mastery of tools like git for that, it's still clearly inferior to the review tool chain in Word.
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.
"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.
I was reading one of my freelance editors' email lists and there was some discussion of LaTeX.
Most of them don't edit in LaTeX. They edit the PDFs.
The writer reviews the edits, and manually makes them in the LaTeX document.
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.
I don't use windows or OSX. Yet word people expect me to learn word/install windows word to help them all the time. They complain about converting it to a pdf *every* *freaking* *time*.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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.
They don't accept LibreOffice? Do they use features of .docx that LO doesn't support?
"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.