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by theophrastus 4518 days ago
yep... we're all ears to alternatives. i often have to publish technical works academically and i really think the current crop of non-LaTeX solutions produce painful results. but i'm up against "we all use MSWord™ because we all use MSWord™" and there will be no getting overworked academics to invest the energy in anything that doesn't look like the tools with which they are already familiar. so... for gawdsake, find me something which isn't LaTeX which produces good equations and good page positioning without crashing and -looks- like MSWord to the non-technical computer user. i've had no luck. (and my cobbled together web nightmare rtf2text, git merge, meta LaTeX rube-goldberg device is leaking oil rapidly)

oh, and it has to play well with EndNote™ too. -sigh-
3 comments
estebank 4518 days ago
Have you tried Lyx[1]? It might not be as straightforward as MS Word, but if you care about the way the page looks, aren't afraid of using writing a little bit of LaTeX by hand, it works great.

[1]: http://www.lyx.org/

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theophrastus 4518 days ago
yes indeed. and it's certainly worthy at the postdoc level. but (quote from the LyX site): "Can I read and write Word files? Yes, but not trivially, and you should not expect to be able to collaborate with someone using Word to edit your paper. You can import Word files, and you can export Word files, but going 'roundtrip' is not workable." ...it's that "round-trip" that is currently vital.

what i really would love to see is some stable fusion of LyX and a web-collaborative-writing program like 'Gobby' (http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/) ... google-docs has been tried, but folks got scared between google-wave suddenly dying and that whole issue of corporate leaking to sinister third parties and corporate scraping

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Fomite 4518 days ago
"you should not expect to be able to collaborate with someone using Word to edit your paper"

This, this is death to every alternative I look at.

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wolfgke 4518 days ago
> but i'm up against "we all use MSWord™ because we all use MSWord™" and there will be no getting overworked academics to invest the energy in anything that doesn't look like the tools with which they are already familiar.

MSWord has the additional problem that it can't be used together with my favourite Version Control System.

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disgruntledphd2 4518 days ago
This post, right here, is one reason I'm glad I'm not in academia any more. I added Sweave to my rube-goldberg device though, and it leaked much, much more.
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