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."
Re:Write in a Word Processor, Format in Latex (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:grammar nazi (Score:4, Insightful)
>"The Ph.D took longer than expected, so before finishing *me* and three others were able to code an entirely new editor"
A Ph.D that makes a mistake that glaring is a sad thing.... we are talking very basic English.
Re:Um... for a Ph.D.? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right tool for the job, stop pounding nails with a hammer, etc.
Latex is typesetting tool. It's designed to take final materials and make them look good in print publications.
Word is an editing tool. Word "processing", as they say. It sucks for any sort of high-quality publication, but you can get what you see on your local inkjet printer.
Word -> Tex is used by real publishing houses as a final step. Unlike the typical PhD student, they have mastered the concept of "division of labor" and don't typeset a document until it is finalized.
The problem is Word is not the lack of "print ready". It is that Word's collaborative editing model is firmly rooted in the 1990s model of sneakerware and emailing documents. And kludging SharePoint on the side doesn't really change the nature of the beast.
The endgame here is a collaborative web application, which provides Word-style collaborative editing capability while able to export structured markup to a Latex-style typesetting program. A healthy dose of user-friendly Git-like functionality is needed too. Google Docs is like WordPad.exe compared what could be done in this space.
Presentation isn't your concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello, I've been writing books for close to 20 years. In addition, for most of the last decade, I've also been a co-maintainer of ~30,000 pages of technical documentation for a well-known family of Open Source software products (one of which is used on Slashdot's backend). This documentation is updated and re-published in toto on a daily basis, in about a dozen end-user formats.
If you're an author, then you're supposed to be writing meaningful content. This means that you should be concentrating on data and semantics.
Presentation and layout should not be your concern--leave this to the professionals (editors and layout people).
Otherwise, use DocBook XML and MathML to author your content, then transform to PDF, RTF, Word, HTML, or whatever end-user format(s) are required using the appropriate toolchain and transforms. There are heaps and heaps of XSLT stylesheets out there for this purpose. You can tweak these as desired/necessary, and it's at this stage--and not before--that you should be even the slightest bit worried about how things look.
If there is one thing that many years in this game have taught me, it's that futzing with presentation issues while you're trying to write merely serves as a huge distraction. And that it is counterproductive to reinvent the wheel for every writing project, which is what formats that munge together content and presentation at the expense of semantics invariably force you to do.
I know it's fashionable around here to disparage XML, but text + semantic markup + styles/transforms works very, very well for producing dense technical material that preserves semantics while providing an easy way to publish something that's pleasing to the eye. For the last 10 years or so, I've refused to use anything else for this purpose. I strongly encourage anyone who's planning to write anything over a few paragraphs in length to check it out.
As for collaboration--why do you even have to ask? Pick a revision control system and use it. Depending on the project and who I'm working with, this would be SVN or BZR for me, but there are many choices. Choose one of them.