Collaborating with LaTeX and git

While the article discusses using --word-diff to view changes by-word rather than by-line, which fixes the problem of paragraph reflows cluttering up the diff display, the bigger problem I've had is that it's not entirely obvious how to patch in that manner. As a result, if two patches touch the same paragraph, they usually conflict. You could avoid that by using the classic researcher approach to collaboration: taking locks on sections. But if you're going to do that, SVN is actually better, because you can break out the sections into separate files, and use SVN locking to do the edit-token bookkeeping, rather than having to pass around a "Mark is currently editing Section 2, pls don't touch" lock through email or in LaTeX comments.

Here's a StackExchange thread discussing possible solutions for finer-grained patching: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5587626/git-merging-withi...

If you have collaborators that aren't fluent in latex, it can be useful to generate an output file (e.g., pdf) that contains marked changes.

I really like latexdiff[1] and a script[2] for making it easier to use with git. The generated pdfs have new text underlined with blue wavy lines and removed text struck through with red lines.

It doesn't properly show bibliography changes when using bibtex, but that's understandable.

[1] http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/ [2] http://eothred.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/latexdiff-and-git/

There are some useful entries on stackexchange for using git with LaTeX. Also useful if you run into any problems: http://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=git&submit=search

This link is just one of the reasons I keep jonesin for HN.

Thanks for posting, I'm in the middle of developing a course for academics about LaTeX, git and collaboration. Perfect hit.

This reminded me of http://www.scribtex.com/, where each LaTeX project is kept in a Git repo.