Texture is a toolset for the production of scientific content | Hacker News Reader

Texture is a toolset for the production of scientific content

github.com

37 pointsmatthberg16 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663274 (8 months ago, 39 comments)

> It has first-class support for JATS, the de facto standard for archiving and interchange of scientific open-access contents with XML.

De facto standard? I've literally never heard of this. Where did this format come from?

This looks interesting. I want to try it out but I got an error ("SyntaxError: Block-scoped declarations.. blahblahblah") and I don't feel like jumping through hoops just to get it going just to try it. Is there a) an online demo or b) a Dockerfile to get this working?

The website doesn't do a great job of describing what advantages this has over LaTeX or LyX, but I want to see for myself.

Last thing: I'll say it, "Texture" is a terrible name. Impossible to Google for, loaded meaning in many other contexts. I presume the "Tex" is for "Tex-like", but is it actually TeX or not? Because if not that's terribly weird to put it in the name.

Edit: Info on JATS here: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/archiving/tag-library/1.1/

"Current Release: 1.0.0-alpha.2 (2016-10-07)"

"The following priorities are confirmed and funded and will be realized until May 2017."

"The next pre-release (Alpha 3) is expected for April 2017."

So, what is the status?

Hi there! Here's one of the developers of Texture. Alpha 3 got delayed a bit. It's a huge release, and it will be out in a couple of days. Stay tuned!

Ahh, from the people at Substance.io. Glad to see the project is still going, even if it's been through multiple pivots.

We can not try it out online, why isn't there a hosted version since it is web app anyway? Do think the (bio)medical world could greatly benefit from such a tool since most researchers in these fields are still writing their papers in Word (as far as I am aware), most these people aren't tech savy enough to use Latex.

Have any researchers tried writing their papers in something like google docs so that it can be collaborative? I will be writing my first paper in a few months, and would appreciate a better way than "track changes" in Word for collaboration.

I write my papers in LaTeX and usually just send the PDF to collaborators to edit, and do my "track changes" using git. It's a bit overkill since I almost never revert to older versions of text, but it's nice having a separate branch for each collaborator and makes it easy to provide context to changes in commits.

For something more collaborative there is ShareLaTeX and another similar service I can't remember the name of.

I don't know what you're looking for beyond track changes, unless you want real-time collaboration, which seems like it would just be asking for something to get screwed up in the revision process.

I use overleaf for sharing papers that I'm working on in latex with collaborators. You can just send them a link and they can edit it. I have to confess that I miss the track changes functionality of word though.

> I write my papers in LaTeX and usually just send the PDF to collaborators to edit

Sorry, I must be misreading. You have plain-text source, but you send your collaborators a PDF to edit? PDF editing seems error-prone at best, and anyway hard to incorporate back into your source.

Back in 1998, a teacher at our university showed my his Word-like editor for LaTeX running on his Solaris workstation.

It wasn't LyX, rather some commercial product I cannot recall the name.

Scuentific Workplace/Word?

Not sure, it was a Solaris Motif application.

Could not find any screenshots similar to my memories, only saw it during one day spent at his office helping with some student assignments.

There is BaKoMa TeX: http://www.bakoma-tex.com/

What is "scientific content"? A journal article? A data set?

Since they mention JATS heavily, and it is apparently a NIH-backed standard, I'm guessing this is useful for people that publish NIH-funded research and may have to use the JATS standard for their work.

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