Fidus Writer: Open Source Collaborative Editor For Non-Geek Academics 160
johanneswilm writes "While writing my Ph.D in anthropology I found out it's almost impossible to get non-geeks to help me with editing my thesis because it was written in Latex. Lyx is almost there, but as it's not web based, it's difficult to use for online collaboration. Writelatex.com is online, but typing LaTeX code is a no-go for non-geeks. Google Docs is web based and near-WYSIWYG, but lacks support for professional print formats such as Latex. The Ph.D took longer than expected, so before finishing me and three others were able to code an entirely new editor: Fidus Writer: web based, open source (AGPL), almost-WYSIWYG and with tools for academics such as citation management and formula support and output formats PDF, Epub, Latex, HTML."
Google Docs CAN DO LaTEX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Requires Facebook, Twitter or Google account... (Score:4, Informative)
Does Not Work (Score:2, Informative)
Hey there!
Unfortunately, Fiduswriter currently only works on Google Chrome. We are working to provide support for Mozilla Firefox.
I'll be back then.
Re:And this, folks, (Score:5, Informative)
I vaguely recall that early on in my philosophy career, I produced a lovely manuscript in LaTeX. The journal insisted that I convert it to Word. I put the effort in to do that. Finally, I get the galleys, with my Word file typeset by the journal's typesetters in India. And it was obviously LaTeX that they used at the typesetting end! I was annoyed. But eventually, I just switched to using Word for most things.
However, more recently I've gone back to using LaTeX for a fair amount of my philosophical writing, partly as my writing has got more technical. I've noticed that many journals accept LaTeX as is (I don't know if that's a new thing). Some do require Word. But my thinking is that I typically don't know which journal the paper will end up accepted by, LaTeX is more fun to write in, the paper is easier to adapt into a Beamer presentation (I've found Powerpoint too difficult and cumbersome), the manuscript will look prettier to referees for whatever that may be worth, and if I need to do one final conversion after acceptance, that's annoying (it can take a while, as I have to go through the text sentence by sentence to make sure nothing was screwed up) but not a very big deal.
And perhaps most importantly, if I use LaTeX, my content and style aren't biased by the limitations of Word. For instance, it would be a big nuisance to include a Fitch-style formal logic proof in a paper in Word. So I probably wouldn't bother, even if doing so would help the reader. Likewise, perhaps throwing in a formula or some symbols with subscripts would be stylistically optimal, but because these things are harder to type in Word than in LaTeX, I might not bother ($x_2$ is more natural for me to type than ctrl-i x ctrl-i ctrl-= 2 ctrl-=, and with LaTeX you don't have the problem that if in later editing you later try to insert a comma after it, Word wants to subscript the comma).
Moreover, for collaboration, plain text formats work very well with svn (there are no do doubt better rcs's, but svn is what I'm used to) as I and my coauthor can easily view the latest diffs, either from the commandline or the web. I suppose Google Docs has nice good collaboration features, too, but they aren't an option for me as Google Docs doesn't have the automatic cross-referencing features that Word and LaTeX have and that I tend to rely heavily on (I just tried Fidus and couldn't find cross-referencing for numbered lists, nor a way to make the numbering resume after an interruption of a numbered list).
So, yes, even in the humanities it can be worth using LaTeX, though admittedly much of my work is on the technical end of the humanities (e.g., I prove not entirely trivial theorems).