The pefect (non-)markup solution

(This
I just found something that’s amazing in its simplicity, and yet neatly solves a problem. Maybe you’ve sometimes wondered how to markup your email (perhaps in cases where you want the same text to be reusable) and yet retain its readability. (I have a friend who sometimes writes email in T_EX markup, which is just incredibly wrong and annoying.) There is a solution that is as close to perfect as imaginable: Markdown. Its Basics page was itself written in Markdown. The syntax is perfectly readable; it is available on Ubuntu and Debian, and can even be generated from HTML, in case one wants to go in the other direction. It even has a Wikipedia article, and (even without looking!) I’m sure it’s the best “lightweight markup language” there is. There seems to be a markdown mode for Vim, but no “standard” mode for Emacs yet. (But with such good and readable syntax, who needs an Emacs mode, anyway?) There is a comparison here. There are converters from MarkDown to other formats (such as LaTeX), see Pandoc (written in Haskell!) and MultiMarkdown.

Another thing that looks impressive (and even more useful, because it is well-integrated into Emacs) is Emacs Muse, can be published to a lot of formats, including DocBook and LaTeX. Documentation here, and someone’s personal notes here.
I haven’t tried either of them yet.

[Update] Emacs Muse is nice, but it’s really not polished enough yet. (Either that, or if it’s not going to change then I don’t like it.) There are no nested lists yet. (It does now.) Markdown says

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

That doesn’t seem to be Emacs Muse’s “overriding design goal” to me (I need to figure out why I feel so, but somehow the syntax feels kludgy and seems to have many bad corner cases).
As I see it, the most powerful and compelling features of Emacs Muse are

1. The entire publishing system, where you can take a document and publish to multiple formats based on syntax translation rules, keeping a daily journal, etc. (planner-el depends on Emacs Muse for some of its functionality.)
2. Its integration with Emacs

Frankly, IMHO, the actual markup language is not one of its greatest features, and it would be great if they used — or allowed plugging in — other existing languages.

(Update-update: This does seem to be the idea, or at least was at some point of time. See this thread, which contains a file that provides some MarkDown support in Muse.)
[End update.]

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Collaborative work with LaTeX

All things considered (after trawling through more than a dozen pages of Google results, that is), I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the best way [as of 2006-10-11] to work on LaTeX documents collaboratively is to use a CVS or Subversion repository, and let everyone commit changes to it.

There seems to be a MediaWiki plugin for collaborative LaTeX, but it needs some attention to security issues…

Someone asked around, and put up an extremely useful summary.

There’s a very short CVS tutorial here.

Update[2007-11-25]: For some reason, the PracTeX journal had three articles about LaTeX+Subversion in 2007-08: LaTeX Document Management with Subversion, Version Control of LaTeX Documents with svn-multi, and Subversion and TextMate: Making collaboration easier for LaTeX users. It’s a good idea to pick the simplest solution that works for you. I haven’t read those articles, but we did use LaTeX in a (somewhat) collaborative way (we weren’t sharing the work much, so it’s not clear the others saw any good in it) for two of our courses, here and here. The websvn interface is a bit crufty; we were using the commandline interface.

The work cycle was as below: (in case you’ve never used version control and don’t know what it is, this will show you that it’s simple after all!)

[Don’t use these URLs; they won’t work for you, of course.]

How to use the algcomp-notes subversion repository.

==Initial setup (only once)==
    svn checkout http://svn.cmi.ac.in/algcomp-notes/ working-dir	

==Work cycle (each time)==
    svn update     # to get the latest version from the repository
Now work with your files as you usually would. After you're done, do:
    svn diff          #optional: to see what you have changed
    svn commit -m "some message, for the history"

Extra files you create in the directory are ignored. To add a new file, use:
    svn add [filename]

That’s all there is to it (apart from setting up — or getting someone to set up — the repository and access to it in the first place. Ask your sysadmin :-)

Update[2008-02-05]: Gobby is a collaborative text editor, and can be used with LaTeX, as this screenshot shows. Someone even wants to use Darcs’s Theory of Patches, and give it proper Undo etc… and at that point we are back to the version control solution, but with a good version-control system and a simple GUI for doing things.

Update[2008-03-25]: Here is a post by an actual mathematician using version control.

I do think it would be a great idea for someone to provide a version-control service for collaborative LaTeX documents over the internet. They could go further and make it easy to edit LaTeX in a browser, and we would have something along the lines of Google Docs.

Update [2009-10-03]: Some other things worth a mention: online LaTeX editors like MonkeyTex (but no one really likes editing in anything other than their familiar environment), a page at Wikibooks based on one of the PracTeX articles mentioned above, and, coming Real Soon Now, support for LaTeX in Google Wave.(link.)

Update [2010-05-11]: Some more things to mention: ScribTeX (see comments below), and LaTeX-lab, a plugin for Google Docs.

Update [2010-06-23]: Also see this Mathoverflow thread called Tools for Collaborative Paper Writing.