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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Woot! (Score:2, Insightful)
But I think word (and OOO.org for that matter) are better at collaboration, mainly because track changes is much more effecient than revision control systems like SVN, git, mercurial
Over time, im sure a project will spring up to deal with this problem.
at one time or at the same time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The standard? (Score:1, Insightful)
"LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing"? In my ten years as an academic researcher I have never met anyone that uses it and only a handful that have even heard of it.
Really? So in ten years as an academic researcher you have never met a physicist or mathematician?
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.
Re:The standard? (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-oriented unstructured way.
But as long as its not much easier to do it the structured way, and to see that it was done that way, almost everyone is going to do it the unstructured way with Word, and the few people who want it right are going to be fighting a losing battle. Which, really, means that as long as its WYSIWYG-focussed, structure won't be the preferred mechanism.
Re:Does anyone do this right? (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 1. Chances are your computer is powerful enough to render the any difference in compilation time insignificant.
I personally find writing equations and symbols in LyX highly inconvenient. Moving my hand back and forth between keyboard and mouse is annoying.
But then again I am just speaking for myself, who only writes documents on mathematics and not other subjects.
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 70,000 word theses in Word, submit jointly co-authored papers in Word.
Use what your community uses, these are the people you will be handing in work to, sending drafts for comments, writing shared reports. No point upsetting them by sending them a document in a format they are not used to dealing with.
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!".
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.
Re:news flash-most people think LaTeX is ugly as h (Score:1, Insightful)
it's close enough for most of us
Speak for yourself. The user base for LaTeX is minuscule compared to Word's. The typical "home user" uses Word. Even in academia, Word is steadily replacing LaTeX. Math departments and a handful of others are the remaining holdouts. The engineering departments at my university have mostly moved to Word, and even the physics department has gone from 100% LaTeX to about 50-50 with Word. Journals that used to insist on LaTeX now accept Word, and many now require Word.
LaTeX is outdated and in serious decline, but its proponents keep sticking their fingers in their ears and saying la-la-la-la-la. What software like LaTeX is running into is the same shift in thinking seen elsewhere, namely: "easier" trumps "better". While LaTeX may be technically better than Word (though Word proponents would argue that Word has caught up in the last few years), many don't view it as being "better enough" to bother with the fairly steep learning curve when Word, despite its deficiencies, is "good enough". This shift happened in industry a while ago, and it's now starting to seep into academia.
I suspect LaTeX will become even more marginalized than it already is.
Re:LaTex Who? (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think a many papers in mathematics use anything other than LaTeX these days. Most books are also in LaTeX. I'd guess the same is true about physics - just look here:
http://arxiv.org/
Half a million articles of pure LaTeX...