Comment by grittathh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grittathh | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for open-sourcing this! At the moment I'm using sharelatex to keep a version of all my equations "alive" since every time someone tries to resave my word documents, the equations become rendered to images.

Unfortunately for me, Latex hasn't gained traction in our department. I think the main barriers to entry, for our lab at least, are:

1) Local installation is more difficult than installing Word. Sharelatex and other cloud-latex solutions solve this.

2) Word's comment and review tracking system is more intuitive. If you're reading a document electronically and want to insert a comment or make an edit in word, you just do it right there. With latex, you can use synclatex to go back and forth but this extra step is actually a non-insignificant barrier. Also, with latex, is there a way to make and see comments in the pdf/preview but have the comment also live somewhere in the source, AND have the comments be editable in both places? I suspect the answer is yes, but I just haven't found the right tool?

I haven't unlocked the "history" feature in sharelatex but does it come close to this?

> Word's comment and review tracking system is more intuitive.

This. The first person that makes a LaTeX comment and track changes system as intuitive as Word's can have all my money. No, the comment and todo LaTeX packages don't count. There's just too much resistance in getting someone to go through the LaTeX install process just to use packages in a syntax they don't want to take the time to learn.

Could version control get you part way there?

The issue really isn't me tracking my own changes. In that case, version control does great. The problem is adoption by collaborators, particularly for PIs that don't want to take the time to sit down and learn something new.

The problem with Word's track / review features isn't necessarily that they're good, it's that they're so entrenched in academic writing (even in the sciences), that attempting to do anything else gets zero traction from most PIs and collaborators. Even PIs that use LaTeX themselves are hesitant to collaborate using it because of the extra friction it introduces as compared to Word's track/review tools.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think the only way to migrate some collaborators away from Word and to LaTeX in a collaborative setting is to basically duplicate Word's track/review/comment features and incorporate them into a LaTeX-based system.

I meant to suggest that git could be used as the "backend" for a track/review system. I'm imagining being able to write standard LaTeX, but have your editor expose the git history in a way that looks like Word's track/review.

(I'm not familiar with LaTeX or the packages you mention, so maybe I'm reinventing a broken wheel here.)

Our history system isn't great at the moment. We made the classic mistake of building a feature that doesn't really work for a lot of people. However, we understand want people want a lot better now and we're working on something that is very inspired/copied from the change tracking in Word. It's a very popular request!

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