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by BrandoElFollito 865 days ago
> all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page

As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

> LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad)

I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in LaTeX (physics) so I know how fantastic it is. You write content without caring for the container - and since changing anything is black magic you give up and do not try (which is a VERY good thing - it just works).

I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

1 comments

> As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

Indeed Google Docs is much better - we also used that - but it's still a WYSIWYG editor, which IMHO it translates to 'extremely hard to enforce style'.

> I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

Yep, Overleaf was what we used. Its paid version was very much like Google Docs but on a plaintext editor wrt. to concurrent access. It could even do change tracking, comments, all the jazz, even Git synching (which we used for backups and CI)

> The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

I'm curious as to why. If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not? When I joined, I didn't know the language at all, but that wasn't a problem-one would learn on the job.

> If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not?

It really depends on the company. I worked (and work) in large high-tech companies and whenever I tried to introduce something like Markdown I quickly hit he wall of non-technical people who did not want to try a new system. They new Word, were suffering with Word but did not have the mindset to give a try to something different.

For the ones on Google Docs it was even more difficult because, arguably, Google Docs is a really neat product for collaboration.

My teams use Markdown for all text (either Obsidian or internal wikis) but this is because they are good in what they do and that they fear their management line :) :) (just kidding)