Collaborative Academic Writing Software? 328
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?"
Word (Score:3, Informative)
Gobby to the rescue (Score:5, Informative)
Gobby [0x539.de] collaborative editor + LaTeX. It would literally be a living document!
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.
Mediawiki with LaTeX support (Score:1, Informative)
What about Mediawiki with LaTeX formula support for writing? After completion the text could be converted to a LaTeX document.
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 CVS.
This is agile development at its finest.
Re:The standard? (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 and get a small little PDF or PNG that you can embed here and there.
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!)
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.
Use AbiWord (Score:1, Informative)
You can make things even easier by using AbiWord [abisource.com], the multi-platform word processor.
AbiWord has a collaboration plug-in [abisource.com] that allows multiple authors to simultaneously work on a document. It also has a LaTeX exporter that will preserve most formatting and document elements, including MathML equations (which are converted to LaTeX ones during export [abisource.com]). You could also save in OpenDocument format, open the .odt file in OpenOffice, and then use its LaTeX exporter [desktoplinux.com], if you find that its LaTeX output is better.
Either way, you should be able to handle collaboration and LaTeX export with easy-to-use, open source word processors instead of (potentially) confusing tools.
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.
Re:Woot! (Score:2, Informative)
You can do a diff with an external program that deals with intraline in a less retarded way. ;-)
I'm actually not sure what there is available for running from the command line (though 'svn diff --diff-cmd' will let you run something other than 'diff', if you can find a command-line replacement), but a lot of SVN graphical front ends also have a graphical diff program, many of which will do this better. (They'll usually highlight the whole line, but then word-by-word changes in a darker shade of red/green.)
Also very awesome is latex-diff. This takes two versions of a document, and marks changes in it using latex markup. You then pass the result through latex, and the result is a PDF that looks like what you get from an old version of Word or (current version of; this is one area it's far behind Word) Open Office Writer with track changes on.
Re:Technical... (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 science disciplines, "latex" is what condoms are made of and "La-Tech" would be a French computer company. At the school I worked in, most of the engineering profs were happy using word. Only one was a serious LaTeX user (and he was definitely "technical"... he used to write liquification simulations in post-script and send them to be processed by the printer because its postscript engine was faster at floating point math and vectors than his 386 with math coprocessor!).
Re:Wiki + LaTeX (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like MediaWiki already supports some TeX:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula [wikimedia.org]
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.
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.
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.
TWiki ? (Score:3, Informative)
TWiki has some extension for LaTeX/MathML...
Re:Woot! (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 through dozens and dozens of revisions in eight or nine writers' Word installations, which are of various versions and some are on Macs. Several times we have ended up converting the final version of the document to ASCII and re-formatting it in Word. It was the only way to restore sanity.
Re:Technical... (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 cases because it was more convenient but mostly because all too many publishers and editors insist on MS Word.
What we use (Score:2, Informative)
Rather than version control as such, when our group writes at the same time (we use latex), we use SubEthaEdit to write actually collaboratively. It's a serious step up from version control. Requires a little more trust, but that's fair enough in co-writers.
Re:Lyx and Version Control (Score:1, Informative)
LyX has support for svn in its version control. See http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX16#toc31.
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:LaTex Who? (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 style file and document template for LaTeX, which you use as the starting point for your document. You then send through a PDF which is already formatted exactly according to their guidelines from the moment of submission.
The premiere journal in natural language processing (Computational Linguistics) for example, certainly requires LaTeX [mq.edu.au].
I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm sure there are plenty of fields where Word is the norm. It just varies. Personally I find LaTeX extremely frustrating, but it is sufficiently less frustrating than Word that I strongly prefer it. The key benefits for me all flow from the separation of format from content. The formatting instructions are explicit, rather than hidden in invisible characters and attributes of the document. If you keep the text-based source in version control, you can always get back to a previous state, and don't wind up have multiple divergent copies as attachments to a multitude of emails. Manually merging a word document that has branched is a bit of a pain, to put it mildly.
Re:Not in any journal I've ever read (Score:2, Informative)
You either lack typographic taste or have seen some bad documents. It is certainly possible to make an ugly document with LaTeX, but it's quite impossible to make a well-typeset document with Word.
Lout LaTeX (Score:1, Informative)
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]