Re: Org-mode as a replacement for LaTeX

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

chris.m.malone@gmail.com writes:

> Hi Tom,
>
> I've seen many of the examples you've added to the mailing list and
> worg. I also enjoy using Org-mode for writing my own documents and
> webpages -  
> currently I'm using it to write my Ph.D. dissertation.
>
> I'm curious how you work on Org-mode papers for publication with
> collaborators? In particular, do all of your collaborators know and
> use Org-mode themselves? Our current method is just to use ordinary
> LaTeX files in a CVS repository for collaboration. I think it would be
> difficult to get my collaborators to all use Org-mode - even though
> they all use emacs. Org-mode has quite a bit of a learning curve that
> they probably don't have the time or patience to learn currently.
>
> Chris

What I do, when I am the lead on a multi-author document, is give my
colleagues the org file directly (but often renamed as .txt for those on
Windows...) and ask them to ignore all the special controls there might
be in the file.  When collaborating on a paper, the key contributions is
the content, not the formatting, so there's usually no problem.  I do
tell them about *bold* and *italic* but that's usually about it.

In fact, I find that I get better collaboration this way because often,
with Word documents, people end up formatting paragraphs etc along the
way causing all kinds of difficulties for the final formatting!

I often send a PDF along with the org just to reassure them that the
paper will look good but that's mostly for non-latex users who have
difficulties separating content from formatting... ;-)

Last year I prepared a quite complex 40+ page document (lists, images,
footnotes, bibliography) with 20 co-authors using the approach described
above and it went very well.

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1
: using Org-mode version 7.5 (release_7.5.511.g2b7d)