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Collaborative Academic Writing Software?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Mar 13, 2009 03:12 PM
from the but-shouldn't-academics-be-good-at-learning-new-things dept.
from the but-shouldn't-academics-be-good-at-learning-new-things dept.
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?"
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Word (Score:3, Informative)
Woot! (Score:2)
Word has version control
That really made my day! I almost ruined a keyboard with my G&T (I managed to keep it in, gin in Finland is too expensive to spew on a keyboard).
But seriously, a collaborative wrapper on LaTeX woud be really neat. Nothing handles citations & equations as well as LaTeX.
Try Plutext for docx collaboration (Score:3, Informative)
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/ [plutext.org]
You get paragraph level versioning, and changes tracked properly.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 thro
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This [colorado.edu] is why
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
Re: (Score:2)
If you want version control for your LaTeX code use the same tools you'd use for your source code.
why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [tigris.org] for Windows and RapidSVN [tigris.org] for Linux. As I said, couldn't be happier with the setup. IMO, any more functionality is absolutely unnecessary.
Parent
wiki first, then convert to LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Gobby to the rescue (Score:5, Informative)
Gobby [0x539.de] collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
Seconded (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Does anyone do this right? (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Does anyone do this right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I concur. It really isn't that hard. I think the most intimidating part is all the preamble stuff like \documentclass \includepackage, etc, etc. So, just get someone else's latex file, and replace whatever's between \begin{document} and \end{document} with whatever you want.
As you use it often enough, eventually you would know what the things in the preamble are for, and you can streamline your latex file. From a practical point of view, you don't have to make a most streamlined latex document from day
I just want to be in the meeting... (Score:5, Funny)
...when you stand up and announce "What this group needs is some latex subversion. Excuse me while I whip this out..."
Re: (Score:2)
That's not so bad though if you pronounce LaTeX correctly. ("Lay-tech")
Lyx supports subversion! (Score:2)
The standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Warning: Microsoft bashing below
Micro$oft is so bad, that when its software works, they break it on the next version!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I find it much easier to do it Word 2003 and later than in older versions, since they have fairly well designed "click and go" style application with visual preview, which puts the structured way more on par with the seductive, but ultimately evil, appearance-orien
Re:The standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
But word is still incredibly stupid about many things. Ironically enough, I have spent this entire week going over an operating manual trying to reformat it for an ISO audit.
Word has no problems breaking a table across a page where it leaves ONE row at the bottom of a page, then duplicates that header row at the top of the next.
The sectioning was driving me batty, and so easy to screw up.
There was no way to "lock in" a style. Somehow I had lines that were formatted as "Heading 3", but were NOT formatted like heading 3. So, choosing "Heading 3" from the dropdown did what... UPDATED the "Heading 3" style instead of CHANGING the text I selected to "Heading 3", wtf.
Then I had somehow a rogue invisible figure that was throwing off the numbering of all my other figures. Even with all characters revealed, I could not find the ghost number. Ended up having to delete all the captions from all figures and re-create them for the numbers to work out properly.
It's just so maddening to have to deal with Word because they have to be in a format that everyone is comfortable with editing. Every 5 minutes I'm thinking "I wouldn't have THIS problem with LaTeX!".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Could be... I had to learn LaTeX about 5 minutes after I started studying CS.
It was really good for creating legible formulas. I think Microsoft has a Formula Editor but it still looks pretty poor compared to LaTeX. I started to do all of my math and science homeworks in LaTeX because it actually ended up being more convenient (I also didn't need to copy and paste from Character Map).
There are a few programs out there (at least for Mac OS X) that let you just type in a formula in LaTeX format real quick a
Re:The standard? (Score:5, Informative)
LaTeX is certainly the standard in physics and astronomy. Of course your point about Unix workstations is correct, as most physics, CS-types, and astronomers use Unix/Linux all the time.
Parent
Is LaTeX worth it for humanities/soc. sciences? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 writ
Re:Is LaTeX worth it for humanities/soc. sciences? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [nitens.org].
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right -- LaTeX does typography much better than Word. Honestly, I've never quite understood why Word still sucks so badly at so many basic typographic functions.
In any regard, however, LaTeX's shortcomings (like you mentioned) make it absolutely unbearable in many situations. Donald Knuth might be the god of CS, but his program absolutely sucks at catching and handling errors. Make a typo, or try to do something that LaTeX doesn't like (there are many things that fall in this category) and try t
Stick with what your community uses (Score:3, Insightful)
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 70,00
Re:Is LaTeX worth it for humanities/soc. sciences? (Score:4, Insightful)
Biomedicine falls in between, into the raping the souls of the sick for money gap.
Actually, us researchers get raped by soulless governments, who underpay us, hate funding our research and yet still expect instant, observable and immediate heath outcomes.
But you were close.
Parent
Emacs wins again (Score:5, Informative)
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)
\include{vqvbg01.tex} (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Lyx and Version Control (Score:5, Insightful)
I use LyX to write my LaTeX docs, and it has some support for using version control [ligwww.epfl.ch] (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.
LaTex+SVN is good (Score:2)
The find the learning curve of SVN is setting up the repository and then checking out the initial documents. The GUI, on the mac use svnX, helps out with this initial step, and anyone who can muster LaTex should be able to work with something like it. Also, there are context menu options available.
What really made things simple for me, on a day to
LaTeX + svn works pretty well, actually. (Score:2)
I've been using LaTeX with subversion for collaboration for years. The LaTeX learning curve is much more an issue than the subversion learning curve.
But if the issue arises at all -- that means you are collaborating, and hopefully somebody in the group knows how to use LaTeX. And that's the best way to learn LaTeX.
Easy solution (Score:2, Informative)
The way I'd tackle this is to setup a central server then install screen. Have each collaborator share the same screen session. That way, every one can collaborate on the same document in real time. The obvious advantage of this is that the fastest typists, which are generally the more experienced coders, will have the best chance of getting edits in place. To tackle the code versioning issue, alias the vi session to something like "cvs commit xxxx". So anytime someone edits a file, it will commit it to CV
Use git, not Subversion (Score:5, Informative)
we've tried a few of these... (Score:3, Informative)
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!)
at one time or at the same time (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps LaTeXiT? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [ktd.club.fr]. 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 [apple.com] for the Mac. It was far easier to deal with just the math LaTEX subset [wikibooks.org], and only at points where I needed it. I imagine a non-technical audience may agree.
Laequed [thrysoee.dk] purports to do something similar for windows. Haven't tried it myself.
gitit (Score:3, Interesting)
Main site [github.com]
Demo site [johnmacfarlane.net]
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.
LaTex Who? (Score:4, Informative)
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/ [essex.ac.uk] 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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Which fields? I also am a trained observer, and my observations are somewhat different.
I have submitted to conferences and journals in two rather distinct fields (cognitive science and natural language processing) and have come across few that did not accept LaTeX, though sometimes in cognitive science it was a bit of an uphill battle.
Most commonly for conferences (which in natural language processing and some other computer science fields are the main up-to-date research publication avenue) there is a styl
TWiki ? (Score:3, Informative)
TWiki has some extension for LaTeX/MathML...
Use version control in any event. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Is there a way to combine the power of LaTeX with the power of Subversion without scaring off a non-technical writer?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 s
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like MediaWiki already supports some TeX:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula [wikimedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)