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> No it's not. Not to speak about collaborating. Oh the fun of sharing a Word doc between 10 people, each one with a slight different version that messes the f
by JorgeGT 10y ago
> No it's not.
Not to speak about collaborating. Oh the fun of sharing a Word doc between 10 people, each one with a slight different version that messes the formats so badly (like that one guy who uses OpenOffice) and constantly making phone calls to ask others to close the document to not overwrite it.
Meanwhile with LaTeX you have plain text source files so you can have nice version control with git or oven github, each person working in their local repo or even branch, with the document having a nice history of commits, blames, merges, etc. Maybe not to the average office worker, but for anyone with experience in coding / version control is a godsend.
- vostok 10y ago> Oh the fun of sharing a Word doc between 10 people, each one with a slight different version that messes the formats so badly (like that one guy who uses OpenOffice) and constantly making phone calls to ask others to close the document to not overwrite it. You can setup git (or your preferred VCS) hooks to make this relatively manageable.
- JorgeGT 10y agoNow Dropbox tells you when others have the document open and so on, so it is easier. But still orders of magnitude worse than working with plain text files.
- johnm1019 10y agoTry Google Docs while working with 3 people at the same time. It will blow your mind.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoOTOH try Google Docs for anything larger than an article. It will blow your browser.
- iamcreasy 10y agoHow large article you are talking about? I used Google Slides to make reasonably heavy power points, and it performed well.
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoIt will rot your mind. I'll take LaTeX + git, thank you.
- selectnull 10y agoOh yes, vim + latex + git is better than any google docs when you know how to use it. When you need to collaborate with non-technical people, it's a different story - I've been in that situation and even successfully taught basic git to few people, it's not worth it in the long run.
- adrianN 10y agoTry Etherpad.
- cm2187 10y agoI think a side by side markup / WYSIWYG is what is missing to PowerPoint and Word. What I would like to see is the equivalent of the WPF editor in Visual Studio, where you can change either and the other updates accordingly.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lottin 10y agoI'm a relatively big fan of TeX but in my whole life only once have I met a co-worker who also used it. Yes, in theory is great for collaborating, but it practice it's not because nobody would know what to do with a TeX file if you sent it to them.
- ktRolster 10y agoput it in a directory with a Makefile, that usually solves a lot of the problem of "knowing what to do with it."
- taeric 10y agoFor me it is less about it being better at collaboration, and more that the popular alternatives are so bloody awful. It is frustrating, because the popular choices all make better demos. But recovery is often so painful that you start living in fear of formatting mistakes.
- ansgri 10y agoNewer Word versions have this Collaborative Mode (available through Office 365) which behaves like Google Docs, except you work in a full-featured word processor. With it you can edit in real-time via both Desktop and Web versions.
- atom058 10y agoYes, we used Microsoft's solution for our master's thesis. <rant> We had to constantly clear cookies, restart the computer, delete our local OneDrive copies and do other quirky work-arounds to be able to do anything. Not to mention the constant crashing and general bugs that plagued the process. As an example: during the final reading of the paper (a three hour session), I had restarted my computer 8 times and created about 15 local copies of the word document "just in case". I have heard similar horror stories from other students as well. It is genuinely shocking to me that Microsoft is getting away with this horrendous performance. </rant>
- iamcreasy 10y agoYes, used it for a university group project and it was unstable.
- codeulike 10y agoThere are plenty of apps offering real time collaborative WYSIWYG these days: Google docs, office 365 etc
- quasse 10y agohttps://www.sharelatex.com https://www.sharelatex.com changed my life in that regard. All the convenience of Google docs, with the determinism of having one single system compiling your LaTeX documents.
- d0100 10y agoI've been using Overleaf to great effect, mainly because it's free version isn't limited to one collaborator.
- Volt 10y agoAlso doubles as a Git repo.
- Numberwang 10y agoI bet you guys sit alone on Jabber while everyone else are having conversations on Skype and Slack.
- treve 10y agoI find that markdown solves the 95% use-case for me, with a much lower barrier to entry, not to mention resistance from others in the team.