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by j2kun 4120 days ago
In any case, my point is plain and simple: I collaborate in almost everything I do, and my collaborators are my primary concern when I choose a tool. If they use notepad and Dropbox, I need to make sure my tools don't conflict with that. There's no way in hell I would ask a collaborator to learn to use git or a new markup language just to work with me.

I'd love a tool that works with this philosophy, and I feel certain anything like ScholarlyMarkdown won't catch on in my field (theoretical computer science) without such tools.
1 comments
timtylin 4120 days ago
As a thought exercise, assuming for simplicity that you can isolate the parts you're authoring, so that your changes only involve additions to other people's work: what kind of additional metainfo would you need for this workflow? All defined labels and macros? Available bib entries? What else?
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j2kun 4120 days ago
I think it depends on how I'm viewing the file. If I'm just editing in SM and building the tex as usual, then I don't need anything extra. If I'm trying to convert to all sorts of other documents (which I haven't ever really done) then labels, theorem environments, one-line macros, and bib entries cover almost every tex-specific thing I use.

Here is an excerpt from a typical paper's macro section [1]. As you can see they're mostly one-liners to remove the need to keep typing textup and mathbb, simple mathoperator definitions and such.

[1]: http://pastebin.com/RL1gejEZ

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timtylin 4119 days ago
I think a good way to build this into SM is to run an existing document thorough latex and looking at the aux file. This approach would be faster and almost certainly more robust, similar to how most latex build scripts look at the fls recorder file for the list of external includes.

The only only thing you can't get will be the user-defined macros (and of course bib entries that doesn't already exist), but there is already a consistent mechanism to define your own macros in SM via the "math_def" block. They "do the right thing" in the sense that if you render to latex snippets then it wouldn't redundantly include these macros in the output.

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