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Comment by extrapickles | Hacker News Reader

If you collaboratively produce documents at your workplace, Google Docs wins by a large margin. Microsoft products have way too many issues when multiple people are editing the same large (100-200 page) document.

Edit: The takeaway for FOSS is that the product has to be lower frustration than the alternative for it to win out.

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That sounds like a nightmare. Google Docs is barely powerful enough for writing a three-page letter. I can't imagine writing a collaborative 200-page document with it.

LaTeX + git would be the ideal, but my coworkers would shoot me for suggesting it.

You would spend half of time solving merge conflicts and dealing with compile errors after bad merge constantly.

Divide your document into chapters, have one tex file per chapter, plus a driver file that runs the whole document (by \include'ing the individual chapter files).

Now try to explain that to the secretary that sends PowerPoint files with Word and Excel documents embedded in them.

Exactly. I shudder at the thought of training a office manager to use latex or git.

Open source has all the technical pieces to do a good job of the issue, but they rarely are seamlessly integrated into a program that someone can be highly successful just by clicking on things that look like what they want.

Not at all. If you do basic coordination of who is editing which section when, merge conflicts are exceedingly rare. I've collaborated on multiple 10-ish page documents (research papers) with 3+ people using LaTeX+git and it has worked just fine.

Or you can use Google doc where whole document is together and basic coordination is not needed and no one needs to be disciplined with how often they push etc.

Coordination is bother, not having to do it is big advantage.

With good open APIs and conversion standards (eg Pandoc), you can have the best of both worlds. It’s all there for the hacking!

Why are people so fo used on Latex ? Do you print that much ? A wiki should be enough for most orgs (but wikis have their own ux issues, I agree)

The main issue with a wiki is that its hard to give one to a customer for long term use. A PDF works much better for this, so when the customer wants to review the hundreds of thousands they spent on consulting a decade ago they can.

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