Timeline for Tools for collaborative paper-writing
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 26, 2016 at 21:23 | comment | added | David Eppstein | I loathe Dropbox for collaborative editing (it's fine for other purposes e.g. synchronizing some of my files between multiple computers). My preferred tool is git. But my experience is that combinations of git and Dropbox are worse than either one alone for potential data-losing screwups, and for creating messes that require a lot of hand-editing to clean up. Use one or the other alone, not both at once. | |
| Oct 15, 2013 at 7:33 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | I don't know how concurrent editing is handled. That's the main problem with Dropbox. You risk losing data because there is no safe checkpointing. My approach is using either Git or Mercurial with the collaborators that wish to learn them, and git-over-Dropbox as suggested above to interact with the others. | |
| Jun 28, 2013 at 2:33 | comment | added | Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin | @Lierre: way less of an issue than giving the paper copyright for free to publishers who put it behind a paywall, which is still the norm for most scientists :-( | |
| Feb 27, 2012 at 10:03 | comment | added | Lierre | @DropBox users : Don't you think it is an issue to give all your research papers for free to a private company ? | |
| Aug 18, 2010 at 23:56 | comment | added | Robert Bruner | Anton: you don't have to download the files. Say I'm working on a paper called newthm. In my ~/papers/newthm directory I create a symbolic link dropbox --> ~/Dropbox/newthm. Then in ~/papers/newthm I can just do "diff chap1.tex dropbox" or, better, latexdiff. With growl installed, you can see when your coauthor is updating things too, so you know to go take a look. | |
| Jun 23, 2010 at 8:14 | comment | added | Lars | I recently started using a combination of git and dropbox: I store the git repository in my dropbox, so I have proper version control AND the advantages of dropbox. I have no experience how well this works for collaborative editing. | |
| Jun 23, 2010 at 3:27 | comment | added | Robin Saunders | Lars: concurrent editing creates multiple copies upon synchronization. | |
| Jan 10, 2010 at 18:51 | comment | added | Anton Petrunin | Yes, dropbox is great. BUT it does not make the DIFFerence (you have to compare older files on your computer --- download both and use some DIFF-editor) | |
| Nov 12, 2009 at 13:20 | comment | added | JSE | Another vote for the remarkable Dropbox. | |
| Oct 28, 2009 at 14:18 | comment | added | GMRA | I agree, dropbox is great. Plus if for some reason your collaborative things exceed 2 gb, you can buy more space for a little bit of money. | |
| Oct 28, 2009 at 13:44 | history | answered | Lars | CC BY-SA 2.5 |