Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com