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Comment by daemonk | Hacker News Reader

I personally really like using latex. But the main problem for me is that latex is not really designed for collaborative editing, especially with people who don't know latex. are there any track changes feature plugin/app that's available and relatively simple for people who mainly use MS word.

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Well, the fact that it is a plaintext-based format makes it work extremely well with git. So for collaboration you can have a repo (even hosted in github) and your co-authors can propose merges, etc. It is extremely nice to be able to see the log of commits and who changed exactly what at any point in time, something I think it's difficult in complex formats like Word. Or you can use sharelatex.com as others have commented.

This all sounds great. I'll definitely look into it for myself. However, coming from academic biology (I am a bioinformatician) where most of my collaborators won't even know what git is, this is just not a realistic solution. If Sharelatex (I actually wrote my phd thesis on sharelatex) or Overleaf (I used for my last publication) have a nice built-in GUI that does all of this auto-magically, I think a lot of people from the biological fields will probably start using it.

I work on a popular academic philosophy magazine which is now transitioning from a centralised inDesign model to a distributed LaTeX model. The idea is that aside from the egrarious costs involved with inDesign (licencing, buying great big computers to run it), the main issue is that it centralises our production around a few people who have both inDesign and typography skills. LaTeX, on the other hand, allows us to abstract away the typography skills with a class file, and have everyone learn some essential syntaxs such as \footnote{}, \includegraphics{}, \begin{quote}, etc. We'll use git or, if people really can't get their heads around a nice git gui, dropbox, to collaborate. I really can't understand why this isn't a more popular approach, especially for academics.

> latex is not really designed for collaborative editing

My personal experience is quite the opposite. In our research team, we collaborated on papers, proposals, theses and similar documents and we exclusively used Latex. Being a text based format, it lends itself well to version controlled (svn/git) repos. It was very easy to track changes and resolve conflicting edits. I don't think any binary format would have worked as well.

> with people who don't know latex

This is, however, painfully true. Newcomers had to learn Latex; but given the prevalence of it in the academia, I doubt it was a bad investment.

checkout sharelatex.com

I've used sharelatex and overleaf. I find them great. But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word. So deleted/added text highlighted by who changed it, comment boxes, etc.

Use latex with git, say on github. You get all those features and more, just with a UI that separates them from the document.

I've collaborated on notes using latex before on github and PR discussions, inline comments, and git collaboration features like branching, descriptive commit messages and diffs, etc. are awesome for productivity.

That said, everyone will need to know how to use latex, git, and GitHub, so gdocs certainly has a simpler workflow.

With latexdiff (included with your LaTeX distribution) it's really easy to produce "track changes" PDFs. (That's the entire purpose of this tool.) With git it's very easy to checkout the .tex file from an arbitrary commit.

There are even wrappers that integrate this with git, so just "git latexdiff HEAD~5 HEAD" will give you a "track changes" PDF between the current version and the one from five commits ago.

I've used this on complex papers where editors have requested it, and it works fine. Once I had to manually tweak the .tex file produced by latexdiff, but it was a very complex use case (packages added and removed between versions) and pretty easy to fix.

> But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word.

We're working on it ;)

I wrote SageMathCloud's collaborative online latex editor. Like ShareLatex, it's collaborative and 100% open source. There's a docker image for very easy personal hosting. SageMathCloud tracks all changes with a "TimeTravel" button for browsing history. You can click a "changes" button and get a range slider to see the exact changes (and who changed them) between any two points in time, with a display similar to github's diff view. It has split pane editing so you can edit two parts of the same latex document at once, along with forward and inverse search. There's also a full terminal (and Jupyter notebooks), in case you want to mix latex with computation/data, or want to use rsync, git, etc.

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