Collaboration ( was: Re: lyx 2.3.7 running on a Mac Ventura 13.6.1)

[Richard Kimberly Heck]

On 1/11/24 06:26, Tobias Hilbricht wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, dem 11.01.2024 um 09:03 +0000 schrieb markhsalmon:
>> it does have features that make it easier to use. The university made
>> its choice I suspect because of the way multiple authors can
>> collaborate
> I agree with you that the collaboration features are a big point in
> favour of Overleaf. The strong desire by many LaTeX-users (and LyX-
> users?) for those collaboration features are expressed by Emiliano
> Heyns, the developer of BetterBibTeX for Zotero, in an interview:
>
> "What I’d love to see is an online (because who wants to have to
> install stuff these days), real-time, multi-author editor, that would
> have a neutered view for my WYSIWYG brethren, a markup view for me
> (LaTeX or something else, as long as I get the stuff I care about), a
> vim mode preferably but at least something that syncs to offline files
> (don’t trust the cloud as the only place for your precious articles).
> LyX would be halfway there if the file format wasn’t so strange, and
> co-authoring (or even version management, really) is a non-starter."
>
> https://www.fiduswriter.org/2017/01/15/emilano-heyns/
>
> I am a WYMIWG brother and like LyX a lot for hiding code from me as
> much as possible, but due to missing collaboration features I use it
> private only and would not suggest it at work, despite many advantages
> of LyX in features apart from collaboration.

I have used LyX for co-authored articles and have not had any problem 
with it. I suppose that's because my co-author and I generally aren't 
working on the same part of the paper at the same time, so you don't get 
weird merge conflicts. Once the paper gets to a certain point, we use 
change tracking, which helps a lot.

Emiliano's remark about version management, from 2017, seems out of 
date. I use git with LyX all the time. It was extremely helpful when I 
was making the final changes to a book recently. It allowed me to check 
and make sure that the only changes I'd made were the ones I thought I'd 
made. The real issue there, it seems to me, is that most such tools are 
line based, so changing a single character here and there can lead to 
the changes looking more significant than they are. But that's true with 
LaTeX, too, to some extent. It's a bigger problem with LyX, because the 
line breaks in the saved version of the file can be completely different 
from that point on in the paragraph.

Riki