Question

I personally use a revision control system (git) to manage my own paper writing, back things up, and synchronize between different machines. However, I've found most programmer's revision control systems to require a bit too much training to try and push on a co-author for the purposes of working on a joint paper.

Are there any people out there using software tools to help handle joint writing? How successful have they been?

Answer 1

I've been using Dropbox for a while. It works like this: You sign up at their webpage for free to get 2gb space which you can access via their webinterface. If you want (and this is the novel part) you can install their software, which sets up a folder on your computer which is automatically (and in the background) synchronized with their server. You can share folders with other dropbox users. Underlying their system is a modified version of svn (I think), and you can go back to revisions via their webinterface. I don't know how concurrent editing is handled.

There are some features missing (selective synching, branching, milestones) but overall it's an awesome free service. The software is very well done and not distracting, I am synching folders from my office computer (linux) with my home computer (windows xp) and it works like a charm.

Answer 2

I've been using svn for all my papers for about a year, and I can't imagine not using some kind of version control now. I've had no problem with getting coauthors to use it, though I don't have any technophobe collaborators.

The disadvantage of Dropbox (much as I love it for other things) is that it's not so good for simultaneous editing; no easy way to merge commits. You also don't get to keep a complete revision history with comments.

I'm less convinced of the value of Google Wave so far; real time typing is almost a distraction, and if I want to discuss math in real time I'm usually best off using the phone, I find.

Answer 3

I use bzr (any particular reason why git, by the way?) and I've ended up using it for just about everything: papers, seminars, teaching, configuration files, my entire website, just about everything I do on a computer is in a bzr repository. Although I've yet to convince any collaborator to use it as well, I still find that it makes life easier since I can easily keep a record of when I sent something to someone else and merge in changes against that particular revision. I can also publish a repository and make it easy for a collaborator to have access to the files without needing to use bzr themselves.

Within a paper, I use the changes.sty package for sharing comments back and forth between myself and a collaborator.

Bzr has "nice" frontends so it might be possible to persuade a non-technologically minded person to use it (I'm a commandline junkie so have no experience of the available GUIs).

I also use a wiki (nlab, naturally) but that is (at the moment) for less focussed projects than a specific paper. However, when writing anything substantial there then I do it "offline" (even so far as to "compiling" and viewing it) and only sending it into the ether when I'm happy with it.

I find it completely incomprehensible that people want everything to be "in the cloud". I have access to several high-powered computers which are capable of running whatever software I'm using incredibly fast. Why would I swap that for a slow, crackly internet link which is guaranteed to be down the one time that I really need it? By using a DVCS (distributed version control system), I only need to be connected to the internet at the start of a given session and I can get my files off any one of a number of machines so it doesn't matter if one or other is down. In the worst case scenario that I can't connect, I can work offline on something and then merge my changes back again later. Indeed, my entire DVCS currently takes up a mere 71Mb (of which 25Mb consists of my local copies of Instiki and xournal) so I could easily carry it around with me on a memory stick (encrypted, of course).

If I really did want to do some "real time" collaboration, I would use either gobby (for working on files or papers) or jarnal (for working on maths). Gobby has real-time editing (and has had for quite some time) whilst with jarnal I can use my graphics tablet to actually write the mathematics for the other person to see just as if we were at a blackboard together. After all, if I'm doing real-time collaboration then I don't want to bother with getting the LaTeX syntax exactly right. I'm not bad at TeX, but if I'm in "Math Mode" then I don't want to be bothering with it.

Answer 4

There is a tool that is very promising, it is called ScribTeX, The free collaborative LaTeX editor. Its description is giving

Welcome to ScribTeX, the online collaborative LaTeX editor. ScribTeX allows you to work on LaTeX documents from anywhere with internet access and share them with your friends and colleagues easily. You can:

* Create and edit LaTeX documents and automatically render them to PDFs;
* View a complete revision history of all your files;
* Keep your documents private, allow people of your choosing to view or edit them, or publish them to world;
* Use BibTeX to keep track of your references and include them in LaTeX documents;
* Upload images and include them in your LaTeX documents;
* Create custom style files and use them in your LaTeX documents.

Hope this can help many of us doing better collaborative work.

Answer 5

For joint collaboration I've used subversion. Having a central repository I think is a really good idea for a paper, although you can set up central repositories in bzr and git.

I would stay away from git for two reasons, however. First, Windows support doesn't seem to me that great. You have to either use something like Cygwin or the port, which is hardly optimal. Unfortunately many people use Windows. The second is that it's a bit harder to use git. I love git myself but subversion is straightforward: there's commit (and conflict), whereas with git you have a local repository you can commit to and then you can also push to a remote repository.

In the end I like subversion for collaborative efforts. The only downside is if you really like to branch your work, then subversion is horrible compared to git or bzr. Bzr and svn also have nice version numbers ;)

Answer 6

This may not be exactly what your looking for, but people are using wiki's to collaboratively write papers. Polymath collaborations are discussed on this blog. And recently a collaborative paper was posted on arXiv from people working on the polymath wiki. This is joint writing taken to the limit.

*New users can only post one link! Sorry, my links to the paper and blog were removed *

Answer 7

How about a wiki?

Every collaboration has its own personality, so I am sure there is no best-for-everyone solution to this question.

Answer 8

People who like MediaWiki or Semantic MediaWiki might look into the facilities at MyWikiBiz. This is a "directory" site that operates on a 2-level model. There are mainspace pages that can be edited by anyone — these are supposed to be verifiable and so on. Then there are author-owned directory pages that only the author and sysops can edit — these are free to be anything within bounds of ethical and legal reason. Collaborative work is possible via the discussion pages and any number of user subpages that you want to create, where a group can hash out a draft and then have the principal or responsible author copy the latest authorized version to the directory page for the paper. I haven't used the Semantic MW and ASK Query features all that much, but they are there for the asking.

Answer 9

Just to add to Jon Awbrey's generous plug for my wiki website, MyWikiBiz... I am currently working behind the scenes with Dr. Martin Hepp who heads the e-business & web science research group at the Universitaet der Bundeswehr Muenchen, to implement the "GoodRelations" semantic properties to our site, which will hopefully organize and streamline a host of semantic data fields (attributes and relations). It will be geared more toward business information, but I'm just pointing out that I am actively willing to collaborate with research/university initiatives to make MyWikiBiz your academic workshop, even if for simply testing out ontologies or collaboration styles. -- Gregory Kohs

Answer 10

One tool that works better than diff (in my opinion) is latexdiff http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/ . The advantage is that the result is a tex file with the deleted text struck-out and the added text underlined. It also uses color. the reason this is nice is for collaborating with people that don't want to use your version control method. once you get the file back from them you simply commit it to the repository and then use latexdiff-vc to see the differences. One of my collaborators likes writing latex in one long line (one line per paragraph) so using regular diff is almost useless with him....

Answer 11

I've heard that the reason people like Google Wave is precisely because it makes collaboration easy. I don't have experience with it, though; perhaps somebody who has used it can comment?

Answer 12

Google Wave does have a robot called watexy that can add maths into conversations. Once you've added it you put LaTeX commands inbetween double $$ signs and it automatically replaces it with an image.

Useful for a maths chat but by no means usable for hacking together a paper or a proof that you can later cut and paste into a proper LaTeX document.

It's a start though.

Answer 13

Sadly, I haven't collaborated yet.. but I would use svn for collaboration. If it's supposed to be a top-secret collaboration, then I'd go for a commercial web svn repository (lots out there that are very cheap). If you think no one could really steal the work from you or that it's ok for people to read it, I would use a free svn repository. The pain is when your partner isn't a techy person, you can't even ask him to merge new versions of works with some sort of merger.. you are supposed to do all the merging from his end.

As for myself, I would not use svn. I usually have papers 15 pages long or so, and I just keep backups everytime I make a milestone and then zip the whole thing (like every month or so).. in case something goes wrong I go back to the backup, it's like a small scale inefficient svn.. but you don't want to kill a bird with an atomic bomb. Always worked for me, I'm not sure for writing books.. probably an svn would become necessary, but I won't be suprised if my backup technique work as well.. it worked for my PhD dissertation anyway :p

EDIT: Most of us mathematician wouldn't have our entire .tex work exceeding 200Mb. For that I would recommend the svn web repositories like (these support closed source, i.e. private projects): XP-Dev and Unfuddle These two are free if you don't exceed 200Mb and you can choose to have the project (you are allowed max 2 or 1 projects for these free repositories.. but I would just keep them in one big folder and name them as 1 project). I like the look and feel of Unfuddle, but XP-Dev isn't that bad either. The advantage of SVN is that it caters for both windows and linux users (for windows I'd recommend TortoiseSVN Client). In case you exceed the 200Mb (which for our purpose is hardly believable.. unless you have lots of images in your LaTeX documents), then I would recommend Assembla because it's very cheap (like \$3/Month/user + \$0.3/100Mb/User) and reliable and you can buy as much space as you want.

Answer 14

A (distributed) version control system which has a solid theoretical background, unlike most others, is darcs (originally written by a physicist). Unfortunately it does not have a nice user interface yet, so it may be not easy to "force" your coauthors to use it...