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.
I’m going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I’ll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.
I did this and I had no issues with any of the thesises I have submitted in my bachelors or masters.
First year calculus teacher, thank you SO much for forcing us to write submissions in latex.
Also, overleaf is a thing, this is not like my 1st year of uni, this 11 years later or so. If your fucking professor never heard of latex they are just bad at academia and shouldn’t be teaching honestly. It’s not just about the field knowledge.
That’s assuming they are competent enough to even use a PDF.
I’m going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I’ll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.
I do this, but from Word.
I learned Latex for my master thesis. Never used it again afterwards, except for my resumé.
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.
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 ;)
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.
I also added a Makefile for mine (LaTeX), and it would add the commit hash to the front page (with an asterisk if the repository had uncommitted changes).
So, if I gave a draft to someone and got feedback, I’d know exactly which revision it was.
docx files are actually zip archives with xml in them
Let me tell you something. I cannot tell you what company, but I have been tasked with putting Excel files in git “because they are just zip archives with xml” and it is just a disaster. Everytime you save the document it will save certain parts of the xml code in arbitrary ways (like each image is in a list and the order of that list is random everytime), some metadata is re-written everytime like time of last modified and finally all the xml files are one single line. The git diffs are complete useless and noisy and just looking at the Excel file will cause git to consider it updated. So sure, you can use git to snapshot you Office documents… But just don’t.
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
I recently read a tutorial titled: “how to annoy your collaborators: a git CI pipeline for LaTeX” ;)
git checkout -b final_version_revised2_REALLYFINALTHISTIME git commit -am “holy fuck I hope this really is the last edit” git pushI wrote my thesis in Google Docs on my university account.
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.
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.
I’m dumb, can someone explain this joke to me? Wtf is a git repo?
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.
