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Comment by tthisk | Hacker News Reader

We can not try it out online, why isn't there a hosted version since it is web app anyway? Do think the (bio)medical world could greatly benefit from such a tool since most researchers in these fields are still writing their papers in Word (as far as I am aware), most these people aren't tech savy enough to use Latex.

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Have any researchers tried writing their papers in something like google docs so that it can be collaborative? I will be writing my first paper in a few months, and would appreciate a better way than "track changes" in Word for collaboration.

I write my papers in LaTeX and usually just send the PDF to collaborators to edit, and do my "track changes" using git. It's a bit overkill since I almost never revert to older versions of text, but it's nice having a separate branch for each collaborator and makes it easy to provide context to changes in commits.

For something more collaborative there is ShareLaTeX and another similar service I can't remember the name of.

I don't know what you're looking for beyond track changes, unless you want real-time collaboration, which seems like it would just be asking for something to get screwed up in the revision process.

I use overleaf for sharing papers that I'm working on in latex with collaborators. You can just send them a link and they can edit it. I have to confess that I miss the track changes functionality of word though.

> I write my papers in LaTeX and usually just send the PDF to collaborators to edit

Sorry, I must be misreading. You have plain-text source, but you send your collaborators a PDF to edit? PDF editing seems error-prone at best, and anyway hard to incorporate back into your source.

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