Counterpoint: advisor said no.
“Just use Word, everyone else does. I have never heard of this latex thing, so must be just some trendy useless overengineered software that does Word’s job but worse. Word can track changes just fine, and you can leave comments.” proceeds to strikethrough, highlight, and inline comment everything instead of using either of those features “I want to read what you wrote, not fight technology” proceeds to email you three separate times after forgetting to attach v28 about how a graphic looks wrong because Word ate it
While correct in the sense of word and versioning via mail being a nightmare, I really don’t think you can expect anyone to learn latex just so they can comment in your document. I would have offered to send a pdf. Shoot me.
you can still use word with git. it’s versioning first, diffing and merging only where possible. since you probably won’t branch you won’t need the latter, though.
Preaching to the choir. “But Box already supports ‘versioning’, why use a confusing hacker tool instead?”
oh I see, you have a shared drive. i assumed you send it around as emails.
A fine assumption given what I wrote. Unfortunately, we did both depending on what he felt like at the time. Yes, for the same doc.
Missing diffs is a problem, though.
I don’t get how Microsoft owns GitHub yet hasn’t figured out any way to actually create a spec that would be git compatible for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files yet.
Easy, they want you to buy a onedrive subscription.
Had to write a paper in college with 100 citations.
We used zotero for citation management, and it would dump a bibtex file on demand.
The paper was written in markdown, stored in git, and rendered through pandoc. We would cite a paper with parentheses and something resembling an id, like (lewis).
We gave pandoc a “citation style definition”, and it took care of everything. Every citation was perfectly formatted. The bibliography was perfectly formatted. Inline references were perfect. Numbering was perfect. All the metadata was ripped from pdfs automatically. It was downright magical.
This is what I (a non coder who only knows git “download the Yuzu repo before they nuke it” and git “give me all the updates”) want to do when I get to write a paper. How much git did you have to learn to do this?
This is just basic make changes to file, git add and commit workflow. Other features of git like branching can be leveraged for greater control but are optional. What makes it magical is 3 seperate systems working together with such symphony namely git, Zotero and pandoc. Zotero is citation manager that you can use store scientific articles, papers, thesis etc. and it can produce a bibliography file and pandoc can reference those along with the citations in the make file to create a clean typesetted Word or LaTeX pdf with precise numbering, table of contents, citations and bibliography with correct format without you needing to edit anything.
yep, markdown is a great alternative to LaTeX if you don’t need fancy layouts or anything special
Markdown + pandoc means it goes through an intermediary latex template on the way to pdf land - which means your markdown can be a bastardized mix of markdown, html, latex commands, and sometimes more ;)
Git is like shit for Word documents
.gitattributes can invoke Word on windows to diff versions, and there are plenty of open source scripts that can do it if you don’t have a copy of Word (or Windows) lying around.
But Word is like shit for papers. Use LaTeX instead.
What’s a good way to learn about Latex and Git. I’ve tried learning on my own but it’s very overwhelming.
Overleaf is easy to use and has tutorials for LaTeX
It is a pity that Markdown does not have the possibilities of Latex.
I learned latex by doing my engineering homework in it. I quit using latex because I kept doing my engineering homework in it and it turns out it sucks to do
git checkout -b final_version_revised2_REALLYFINALTHISTIME git commit -am “holy fuck I hope this really is the last edit” git pushI’m dumb, can someone explain this joke to me? Wtf is a git repo?
Git is a tool that makes it convenient and lightweight to keep past snapshots of a directory of text files (called a repository) and compare them. It also makes it easy to have multiple people work in parallel on the content of the directory, see the differences and merge everything into a common version. It is essential in programming, it’s called versioning or version control.
Although it is not easy to access for non programmers because it’s based on slightly obscure command lines. So it’s a bit of an over-engineering to use it for a single file edited by a single person. Especially because you can now put those on the cloud and have some form of version control that allows to easily compare and go back to previous versions graphically.
It may be worth it if it’s a long document that you work upon for a long time, such as a PhD thesis.Thanks for explaining!
Okay, I have a question. I would love to write my papers in latex, but none of my colleges use it. Is there a way to reasonably collaborate with coauthors who only use Word and for whom Latex would be confusing and difficult?
You don’t. You could try overleaf or some wysiwyg editor for LaTeX, but both need some getting used to and at least a minute amount of effort. Overleaf probably has the lowest barrier of entry (0 set up required), but is a paid service.
It depends on what sort of collaboration. For things on which I was the sole author, like my dissertation, I leveraged the miracle that is pandoc. Every email my advisor got from me was a perfectly formatted Word doc with a flawless bibliography and he never had to learn what the hell LaTeX is.
But if you have multiple contributors going back and forth, or need to keep long-lived discussions in the track changes panel, you’re better off not trying to teach others a new tool. Unless they have a genuine interest in it, in which case the WYSIWYG editors can be fun.
Markdown and pandoc are like match made in heaven for this. If you didn’t know, Markdown is plain text file, has a simple syntax for formatting (that gets carried over when you use pandoc), supports LaTeX equations and can attach metadata as yaml part on top of the file (gives custom usability when pandoc works on it) and supports citations w/ a bibliography file. And pandoc is document converter between multiple formats and can produce word files, PowerPoints, html file, latex pdfs (book, report, Beamer presentations) etc. You can also provide a template for pandoc to work with and it produces in that format. Not to mention since it’s plain text, you can apply git version control and also use make files to iteratively compile new outputs.
There is also RMarkdown (or it’s newer successor Quartro), which is same markdown pipeline but also can compute codes inside a section and attaches the result to the markdown file and does the whole pandoc thing afterwards. Think of it as like Jupyter Notebook style of literate programming with Markdown. Here’s a demonstration of its capabilities. https://youtu.be/_D-ux3MqGug
Assuming your colleagues can work with git but not LaTeX, you can set up a git repo with just markdown files and collaborate on that and have a makefile or docker container to get the final word or pdf generated. Here’s a good example of an pandoc makefile https://gist.github.com/kristopherjohnson/7466917
In Worst case scenario that they only work with word files, you can generate one from your markdown files and share with them and pull down the changes they sent you on the word document.
P.S. I assume Org-Mode can also substitute Markdown here in the pipeline. But I haven’t committed to it, so I’m not fully sure.
Don’t you automatically put everything relevant you create in a version control system? And if not, why?
There’s no thinking involved on it. Create repo; run editor. The sequence is automatic.
Between zfs and git, all my important data is versioned.
BTRFS for all us lame folks.
PS Windows pervious versions is actually pretty good, but no one uses it on desktop.
Don’t forget to push.
Several times I’ve lost large chunks of work because I usually copy files from the main folder to backup folders, but occasionally I copy files from a folder that was an old backup, reverting all files everywhere by mistake.
Fourth panel from Mark Pilgrim:
- Writing a programming book that typesets your sample code into the book and also runs it to update the sample output shown in the book.
