on Fri, May 27, 2005 at 12:47:37PM -0700, Dylan Beaudette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Hi everyone, > > A colleague and I were recently talking about adopting LATEX as the > format for dissertations and publications and the like, but always > came up against a problem: collaborative writting efforts. > > While it is ok for me to write all of my stuff in LATEX, sharing an > editable, electronic version becomes complicated when working with > others who have no interest in using LATEX as well. This is probably > why M$ word is so widespread in this dept.
It's not a particularly good format for this, it's just widely
distributed. I'll echo Henry's suggestion for using DocBook, for which
plugins exist for a number of authoring tools, including those by that
company that pressed charges against Dmitry Sklyarov for identifying its
broken digital restrictions management implmentation. Not sure if MSFT
products are supported....
A minute or so with Google shows a number of possibilities, including
plugins for Our Name Is Mud software, antiword's option to output
DocBook format, and the DocBook Wiki.
http://www.winfield.demon.nl/
http://www.getnet.net/~swhitlat/DocBook/docbook_section.html
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/ConvertOtherFormatsToDocBook
> We came up with a couple possible solutions consisting of sending
> parts to be checked in RTF or text format, while keeping the original
> in LATEX. This of course is not always a very feasible option, as
> collaborators often want to see and work with the entire manuscript
> with figures.
My suggestion would be to use a format for document interchange, then
merge back to LaTeX (or other format) as needed. From the LaTeX
sources, you can generate PS/PDF output, which may meet your needs for
distributing a full manuscript-to-date, though not in a directly
editable format.
There are tools to convert _to_ RTF from HTML or LaTeX sources, which
may address some issues of interchange. RTF itself is a parseable
text-based format which may provide sufficient formetting context to
> Does anyone know of any existing methods of doing one's writting in
> LATEX, with the option of making it available for edits to others not
> using LATEX?
Yet another option is to use one of the online collaborative authoring
tools, of which Drupal is one option. It has a "book" mode in which
multiple users can edit text for assembly into book format. I haven't
looked at this in depth, but it piqued my interest:
http://drupal.org/node/284
Looks like it's best suited to online materials, but again:
well-structured HTML should be amenable to conversion to other formats.
I use a system to manage a document maintained in HTML and automatically
output to text, PS, PDF, and DOC (well, really RTF) formats, using shell
tools.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <[email protected]> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
LNX-BBC: Bootable GNU/Linux -- Don't leave /home without it.
http://www.lnx-bbc.org/
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
