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Comment by af3 | Hacker News Reader

No, I won't stop. There is nothing better than Word to collaboratively work on a manuscript in a research environment. Yes, this is "Editing - Emailing - Editing" cycle, but no one has suggested anything better that actually works.

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I do research in physics. Typically we use git and latex. That's because it is easy to branch out and change the structure of the document, you can include the scripts and data used to generate data in the same repository and there's a nice, easy-to-use front end in Github.

You get most of the features of word, and the math looks better. And it's platform-agnostic! It doesn't matter whether you make that document on Windows, Mac or Linux, and it doesn't matter which software you use either. And cross-linking in the document is easy and a file-based database can be used to store the bibliography.

Word is very hard to you use once you get used to that system...it's too inflexible and a complicated document gets mangled when crossing the OS boundary.

> I do research in physics. Typically we use git and latex.

That's only convenient for an already existing research group. The usual workflow of incidental cooperation, like a course instructor sending additional materials to students, is to generate a pdf from the LaTeX documents they wrote or otherwise obtained and e-mail it.

The fact is that it's much harder to train people who haven't had programming experience (e.g. biologists or medical doctors) to use this stuff. Word does the same thing pretty well (better imho, the reviews interface is intuitive), and has plenty of citation managers too

It's also close to impossible if the journal or conference doesn't give you a LaTeX stylesheet, which is uncommon outside physics/math/CS. Sure, you can in principle produce your own stylesheet conforming to the formatting requirements, but even most seasoned LaTeX users find the stylesheet language to be black magic (I dread having to make even minor edits to a stylesheet).

Matching citation styles used to be a problem also, but tools like Jurabib and Biber have mostly solved that problem.

Google Docs works rather well for this workflow. You can add comments, edit concurrently (like SubEthaEdit), press a button to open a video hangout with your collaborators, and you get a full revision history. And, you don't have to email the doc around!

Google Docs is most often blocked by organizations.

Citation? Google Docs is often used at organizations (they even pay for it!). There's a reason why Microsoft is moving into the same territory with Office 365--businesses require collaboration and emailing docs around is incredibly bad at accomplishing that.

Even more telling is MS stopped Office Live which didn't edit online in favor of Office 365 which does edit online. It's just a matter of time before it switches and the desktop version is an add-on while the cloud version is standard.

Federal Organizations

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html

The GSA itself is a Google Apps customer. NOAA also made news this year by moving over its 25,000 users.

I am talking about the federal government that may handle sensitive information - not local government. Where important things are done they do not use Google Apps. They use Microsoft Exchange for email and .DOCX for word documents.

NOAA is the federal government and is pretty important. Unless issuing tornado warnings and forecasting hurricanes is not important, that is.

I assumed by "research institution" he meant a university, which doesn't really care about "leaks" like Big Corporations do.

Then again, there are quite a few big corporations on Google Apps.

I hope this is meant as a joke.

I've worked in research for several years and we almost exclusively kept LaTeX documents in a Git repository. This worked perfectly: Multiple people can edit the document at the same time and you can also add additional comments to the document that don't show up in the output.

That may be true for math and CompSci research, but I think you'd have rather hard time convincing panel of, say, climatologists to learn LaTeX and git.

This is very true. We've tried using Google Docs and it just doesn't work the same; this is esp. true with less tech savvy users. If I am working on different page and someone is editing the top of the doc then it pushes everything I am doing down and interrupts my train of thought.

View > Document view > Compact

Yeah, Google made a mistake in changing the default to Paginated. Still, Docs is light years ahead of Word + trying to emulate git's CVS via file names and mental notes.

Me neither. A lot of what I do (proposals, specs) requires multiple people making simultaneous changes to a document.

I do however not have to do the edit-email-edit thing. We use SharePoint at work, which lets all of us make changes to a document in realtime.

This works inside and outside the company. The partners we typically collaborate with authenticate using identity federation. It works really well for us.

Google docs works infinitely better for this. The feature set may not be as comprehensive, but it nails ~97% for me, and the ease of collaboration is far superior.

> There is nothing better than Word to collaboratively work on a manuscript in a research environment.

Use version control, or wikis.

TeX+git

+ Google Docs does not have EndNote support.

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