[TxMt] PracTex journal tips, revision control and academic workflow

[Christoph Held]

Hi Haris,



On Feb 18, 2008 3:11 PM, Charilaos Skiadas <cskiadas at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I actually suspect some of these articles were written by TextMate
> users ;). I'm assuming you were looking at articles here: http://
> www.tug.org/pracjourn/2007-3/index.html
>

you are probably right on both counts.

What about any of those tools that claiim to be doing backup/mirroring  and
versioning of everything  (including binary files?) at once such as Brackup:
http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Brackup-1.06/lib/Brackup/Manual/Overview.pod

There is not much in terms of docs but it looks interesting. To me it looks
as though it may do exactly what I need. Except, only when it will be ready.
Sigh.

Or perhaps rsync or unison?

With all these tools I know I am going to loose some metadata but I simply
don't know which ones I can afford to loose without ill effects.

Any comments on these? I know I will have to cover the backup process
separately if I am using rsync or unison. Is there a reason I should not
rely on TimeMachine for this?

Re Latex as a writing environment:
Although I am sitting on the fencing watchin the Latex scene with interest,
I am more attracted to Multimarkdown even though I am using it in an
extremely rudimentary fashion at the moment. The simple reason is that most
of my papers are written with one or more co-authors who have never used
anything besides Word and are so used to blame the usual incompatibility
problems on the imperfections of the tools others use rather than thinking
about how this is a self fulfilling prophecy. I can't tell you what I am
tired of most, using Word myself or explaining time and again that choosing
to ignore the World outside MS Windows is hardly a sign of supremacy. Be
that as it may, in my field I cannot count on Latex users around and need
something that requires as little paradigm changes as possible.

Multimarkdown is very readable as such and I can exchange test files with
Word users and the only thing I need to ask them is to please respect the
#'s they may encounter here and there. Well, there is some more markup but
orders of magnitude less than in Latex.

>
>
> For LaTeX documents at least, there is the wonderful latexdiff
> package, which will effectively do word-by-word comparison and
> produce a pdf file for you that shows the differences that have
> occurred in the document in a wonderful way, and I think it can be
> instructed to skip spaces. But by default all these version control
> systems look at lines. Is that so much of a problem however?
>
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/


I will take a look at it nonetheless, thanks.

> <http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/>
>

>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Haris Skiadas
> Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
> Hanover College
>
>
> Your reply has been very helpful indeed. After all, you were one of the
> authors who got me started. If I were in Astrophysics I'd start learning
> Latex already, but molecular biology is a different field. I would either do
> it for the pleasure of writing the lone reviews for myself or have to impose
> my set of rules on my co-authors. Neither situation is frequent enough or
> gives me enough pleasure to make me *want* it enough, I guess.


Prion
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