Interesting Discussion on Academic Collaboration Writing and LaTeX

[Eric Durbrow]

Although I disagree that LaTeX is the academic writing language I do
agree that it is showing its age. There is any interesting at Slashdot

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/13/1925238&from=rss

that asks people to suggest alternatives to LaTeX for collaborative
academic writing. One person proposed MediaWiki. Anyone?

E. Durbrow Ph.D. dur...@gmail.com
Note to Students: Get essay ideas by...
http://psycmeetsreality.tumblr.com/
or http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16296206292021843372
or http://friendfeed.com/durbrow
or twitter: durbrow
And try: www.ripple.org or www.thehungersite.com

[Jan Erik Moström]

On 14 mar 2009, at 00:56, Eric Durbrow wrote:

> Although I disagree that LaTeX is the academic writing language I do
> agree that it is showing its age. There is any interesting at Slashdot
>
> http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/13/1925238&from=rss
>
> that asks people to suggest alternatives to LaTeX for collaborative
> academic writing. One person proposed MediaWiki. Anyone?

I don't know ... I'm in several groups that are geographically
distributed and we're using LaTeX and subversion. With a good GUI
client it works well ... the major problem seem to be install
subversion. The basic commands seem to be pretty easy to learn - I've
written a few mini tutorials which seem to get people going

<http://www.mostrom.pp.se/notes/Tutorials/SVNMiniTutorial>

<http://www.mostrom.pp.se/notes/Tutorials/SVNTortoise>

A couple of times we have tried to use Word which ended in quite some
frustration. If we are forced to submit using a Word document we
usually write using LaTeX and then some poor person has to convert it
to a Word document using cut&paste.

jem

[Bill Harris]

Jan Erik Moström <mos...@gmail.com> writes:

> A couple of times we have tried to use Word which ended in quite some
> frustration. If we are forced to submit using a Word document we
> usually write using LaTeX and then some poor person has to convert it
> to a Word document using cut&paste.

I still use LaTeX or DocBook (perhaps with asciidoc as a front end) as
my preferred tools.

If I have to create Word output, I've used
http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/ when coming from LaTeX, and I've found
somewhere a DocBook toolchain that lets me create output Word can read.

The one piece I'm missing is a way to deal with Word revision marking
from another environment; I realize taking Word back into a structured
environment such as LaTeX or DocBook is practically impossible.

On a related note, see my recent "How do you think in Word"
(http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/2009/03/how-do-you-think-in-word.html).
Perhaps some here would have suggestions.

Bill
--
Bill Harris http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/
Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
http://facilitatedsystems.com/ phone: +1 425 337-5541

[james]

On Mar 13, 11:56 pm, Eric Durbrow <durb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Although I disagree that LaTeX is the academic writing language I do  
> agree that it is showing its age. There is any interesting at Slashdot
>
> http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/13/1925238&from=rss
>
> that asks people to suggest alternatives to LaTeX for collaborative  
> academic writing. One person proposed MediaWiki. Anyone?

There is ScribTeX [1] which is an online collaborative LaTeX editor.
It makes it pretty easy to edit and collaborate on LaTeX documents and
supports all the necessary LaTeX and collaboration features. I've
certainly found it very usable compared to the other solutions out
there.

[1] http://www.scribtex.com

[Jody Klymak (901)]

>
> The one piece I'm missing is a way to deal with Word revision marking
> from another environment; I realize taking Word back into a structured
> environment such as LaTeX or DocBook is practically impossible.

I'm not entirely sure what you want here, but if you want a Word-like
diff marking system then latexdiff works really well these days. Red
and struck out is old, and blue is new in the pdf output. It looks
quite good. I use it when I resubmit a paper so the editor and
reviewers can easily see what I've changed.

Anyway, you sound like you wanted something to go back and forth from
Word, so this is perhaps not what you were after.

Cheers, Jody

[Bill Harris]

"Jody Klymak (901)" <jkl...@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm not entirely sure what you want here, but if you want a Word-like
> diff marking system then latexdiff works really well these days. Red

> Anyway, you sound like you wanted something to go back and forth from

> Word, so this is perhaps not what you were after.

Jody,

Thanks. I have used that but not in a while; this is a good reminder
that I should use it more often.

You're right, though; the only reason I find at all compelling to want
to use Word is to link up with others where we have to collaborate using
Word's revision marking.

[Eric Durbrow]

I just want to add to this discussion that TeXShop on the Mac and LyX
(all platforms?) have recently been updated.

E. Durbrow Ph.D. dur...@gmail.com
Note to Students: Get essay ideas by...
http://psycmeetsreality.tumblr.com/
or http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16296206292021843372
or http://friendfeed.com/durbrow
or twitter: durbrow
And try: www.ripple.org or www.thehungersite.com

[yarapavan]

IMHO, Lyx seems to support this feature

~
Pavan