Every­one who has writ­ten a paper with another author will know it can be tricky mak­ing sure you don’t end up with two ver­sions that need to be merged. The good news is that the days of send­ing updated drafts by email back­wards and for­wards is finally over (hav­ing lasted all of 20 years — I can barely imag­ine writ­ing papers before email).

Non-LaTeX solu­tions

If you are will­ing to forgo the ben­e­fits of LaTeX, there are a few solu­tions available:

• Google Docs. This is my favourite non-LaTeX solu­tion, partly because it inte­grates seam­lessly with other Google prod­ucts and also because you know there are a lot of smart peo­ple work­ing at mak­ing the prod­uct even bet­ter. It is easy to save the doc­u­ment as a pdf or in MS-Word for­mat when it is fin­ished. I use it reg­u­larly for short notes and non-mathematical documents.
• Zoho offers a large and mature suite of prod­ucts for online col­lab­o­ra­tion includ­ing online writ­ing.  I’ve never used it, but the reviews sug­gest it is an excel­lent alter­na­tive to Google Docs.
• Microsoft Docs is the lat­est player in this space. Cur­rently you must sign on with a Face­book account and you can only col­lab­o­rate with Face­book friends. That seems a lit­tle odd, as many peo­ple (includ­ing me) tend to keep our work col­leagues and our face­book friends as dis­tinct groups with lit­tle if any over­lap. MS Docs is built using Microsoft Office 2010, so pre­sum­ably it has more facil­i­ties than Google docs. On the other hand, as a new prod­uct it prob­a­bly has a lot more bugs as well.
• Doc­Verse. This is a plug-in for Microsoft Office which allows sev­eral peo­ple to work on the same doc­u­ment and even dis­cuss the doc­u­ment via a chat panel. Not being very fond of MS-Office, I haven’t tried it.

LaTeX solu­tions

I’ve been watch­ing the var­i­ous online LaTeX tools for the past year as they have devel­oped. Finally, one of them appears to now be usable for real col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing. I am cur­rently using Scrib­TeX to write a paper with two coau­thors. There is no need for any of us to have a local LaTeX instal­la­tion (although we all do).  One author must set up a “project” for the paper which con­tains any graph­ics, bib files, local sty files and one or more tex files. Then start work edit­ing the tex files online. Just click “Com­pile” to process the file and the pdf ver­sion appears in another win­dow. The file is saved online so every­one has access to exactly the same ver­sion.  If you use any pack­ages from CTAN, they will be included auto­mat­i­cally. Here is the win­dow (in a browser) show­ing the paper I am cur­rently work­ing on.

Other authors can be invited to join the project pro­vided they have first reg­is­tered on Scrib­TeX (which is free). Then all authors will be edit­ing the up-to-date ver­sion. It is easy to roll back to an ear­lier ver­sion and it is pos­si­ble to see who mod­i­fied what. The free account allows up to three projects with one col­lab­o­ra­tor (i.e., two authors) per project. For $6 per month you are allowed 10 projects with up to six authors on each. For $10 per month, there are no lim­its (other than 1Gb of storage).

There are a few other sim­i­lar solu­tions in development:

• LaTeX Labs. This is in the early stages of devel­op­ment, but has the cool fea­ture that the doc­u­ments are stored on Google Docs so there is vir­tu­ally unlim­ited stor­age. It is still miss­ing a lot of fea­tures, but shows promise.
• Ver­bo­sus. This is a lit­tle harder to use than Scrib­TeX and does not come with all CTAN pack­ages pre-installed. But it has a nice text edi­tor and project man­age­ment interface.
• Mon­key­TeX is also try­ing to solve the same prob­lem. It’s inter­face is a lit­tle more prim­i­tive than the oth­ers, but there are nearly 6000 users and 12000 doc­u­ments stored, so it can’t be too bad. There is appar­ently a screen­cast to intro­duce its fea­tures, but it wouldn’t dis­play in Chrome so I didn’t look further.

None of these three seem ready for reg­u­lar use yet, but I can rec­om­mend Scrib­TeX. Please try it out and let me know (via com­ments) how you get on.

Tags: LaTeX, writing

I’ve been writ­ing a grant appli­ca­tion with a 10-page limit, and as usual it is dif­fi­cult to squeeze every­thing in. No, I can’t just change the font as it has to be 12 point with at least 2 cm mar­gins on an A4 page. For­tu­nately, LaTeX is packed full of pow­er­ful fea­tures that help in squeez­ing it all in. Here are some of the tips I’ve used over the years.

Make your text block as big as pos­si­ble. The sim­plest way to do that is using the geom­e­try package:

\usepackage[text={16cm,24cm}]{geometry}

Use a com­pact font such as Times Roman:

\usepackage{mathptmx}

Remove the spac­ing between para­graphs and have a small para­graph indentation

\setlength{\parskip}{0cm}
\setlength{\parindent}{1em}

Remove space around sec­tion headings.

\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}
\titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{2ex}{1ex}
\titlespacing{\subsection}{0pt}{1ex}{0ex}
\titlespacing{\subsubsection}{0pt}{0.5ex}{0ex}

Beware of enu­mer­ated and item­ized lists. Instead, replace them with com­pact lists.

\usepackage{paralist}

\begin{compactitem}
\item ...
\end{compactitem}
\begin{compactenum}
\item ...
\end{compactenum}

If you are allowed, switch­ing to dou­ble col­umn can save heaps of space.

\usepackage{multicols}

\begin{multicols}{2}
...
\end{multicols}

If the rules say 12pt, you can usu­ally get away with 11.5pt with­out any­one noticing:

\begin{document}\fontsize{11.5}{14}\rm

When you get des­per­ate, you can squeeze the inter-line spac­ing using

\linespread{0.9}

There is also a savetrees pack­age which does a lot of squeez­ing, but the results don’t always look nice, so it is bet­ter to try one or more of the above tricks instead.

A few more tricks are explained here and here.

Tags: LaTeX, writing