[clug] Any experience in collaborative authoring using Version Control and Latex??

[Brad Hards]

On Tuesday 08 January 2013 20:07:31 steve jenkin wrote:
[Stuff about version control and latex I'm ignoring for lack of anything 
meaningful to say]
> I specifically don't want a real-time "Collaboration Tool" 
Can I ask why? I see collaborative authoring as a part social / part technical 
problem. The social part of your problem description sounds like "how do I 
keep people from breaking the versioning scheme, and how do I handle the merge 
conflict issues?". A common view and a single shared source (as opposed to 
copies / checkouts of that source) might help with that.

> [Google had
> one of those and set it free a couple of years ago, didn't they? Name
> escapes me...]
Google has had several [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-
time_editor#History].

A rewrite of a spin-off of one of those is Etherpad-lite 
(http://beta.etherpad.org/ demo, https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite#readme 
docs and source) is pretty easy to set up, and while its obviously basic in 
terms of formatting, that might be a big advantage during the collaborative 
stage. You can export the consolidated text into a range of format (also 
imports by the magic of libreoffice) when you get to the do-layout-and-convert-
to-paper stage.

Brad