3 ms·

I'm not talking about final documents. Sure, only PDF/A makes sense (handily outputted in the LaTeX flow btw). I'm talking about what comes before. Most don't

by brnt 3y ago

I'm not talking about final documents. Sure, only PDF/A makes sense (handily outputted in the LaTeX flow btw). I'm talking about what comes before. Most don't have the luxury of a publishing department producing a clean pdf from what's no doubt a handful of Word inputs. Apart from horrendous formatting issues introduced by incompetency and variety of Word versions (including limited mobile/online versions), the purpose would be astronomically better change integration when 10 people concurrently review for starters. If you've never had to integrate changes from a handful of people for 100+ page documents, praise your deity.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
You’re talking to programmers here. We trivially add thousands of lines of changes to text documents that we all collaborate on daily and can tell you the history of every line going back for years. The trick is to use open source version tracking and a simpler text editor. I suspect that markdown in a gui editor could do everything that actually needs doing.
Spooky23 3y ago
I’ve worked in public sector in various capacities forever. Nobody cares about in-process work products, even within organizations. They usually aren’t subject to FOIA or similar and only apply in limited circumstances. Every employee with a reasonably recent office suite can produce a high quality PDF of whatever they are producing. I actually have done such things. It’s not that bad - the process of review is the painful part. Nobody has the skillsets to manage latex source code in a collaborative environment. I actually did a pilot a few years ago with Markdown and GitHub to collaborate on a large report for a multi-organization project. We quickly abandoned it for Word/Sharepoint and it worked fine. The only practical exceptions I can think of are typesetting for publishing and bill drafting. Both are narrow use cases with specialized staff and tools. I definitely see where having a system output LaTeX could be useful for those use cases. But not the the collaborative aspects.
- brnt 3y ago
  'out' sharepoint does nothing for chance resolution, therefore concurrent editing is always problematic. Can you explain how you tackled this? This is a huge problem for us, but maybe I should ask someone yo enable something on the SharePoint share?

by brnt 3y ago

dghlsakjg 3y ago

You’re talking to programmers here. We trivially add thousands of lines of changes to text documents that we all collaborate on daily and can tell you the history of every line going back for years. The trick is to use open source version tracking and a simpler text editor. I suspect that markdown in a gui editor could do everything that actually needs doing.

Spooky23 3y ago

I’ve worked in public sector in various capacities forever. Nobody cares about in-process work products, even within organizations. They usually aren’t subject to FOIA or similar and only apply in limited circumstances. Every employee with a reasonably recent office suite can produce a high quality PDF of whatever they are producing. I actually have done such things. It’s not that bad - the process of review is the painful part. Nobody has the skillsets to manage latex source code in a collaborative environment. I actually did a pilot a few years ago with Markdown and GitHub to collaborate on a large report for a multi-organization project. We quickly abandoned it for Word/Sharepoint and it worked fine. The only practical exceptions I can think of are typesetting for publishing and bill drafting. Both are narrow use cases with specialized staff and tools. I definitely see where having a system output LaTeX could be useful for those use cases. But not the the collaborative aspects.

brnt 3y ago
'out' sharepoint does nothing for chance resolution, therefore concurrent editing is always problematic. Can you explain how you tackled this? This is a huge problem for us, but maybe I should ask someone yo enable something on the SharePoint share?