Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Travis Cardwell
<travis.cardwell@example.com> wrote:
> On 2014年05月17日 20:29, Raymond Wan wrote:
>> I love LaTeX and try to do as much as I can with it.  But one thing
>> that Microsoft Word does well that LaTeX does poorly is track changes.
>>  Annotating a PDF file with Adobe is not quite the same...
>
> I did a review of an academic paper very recently, and it was done using
> LaTeX.  The authors used a Git repository for collaboration and added me
> as a contributor.  It worked *very* well!  With branches, pull requests,
> and merges, I think that plain text provides much more powerful change
> tracking than Microsoft Word! ;)


I'd knew you say this!  :-)

I don't use Git myself and prefer Subversion.  If the two are similar,
then I take your point that it is powerful if the people you are
working with are knowledgeable with version control, etc.  But, I'm
not talking about just technical power...Microsoft Word just makes it
look "nice" where you have each author's comments colored and you can
right click on each and Accept or Reject Changes.  I don't know how
many authors it supports, but surely at least 3 (i.e., comes down to
number of coloring schemes).

By the way, are changes based on a line-by-line comparison?  I know of
authors who prefer not to add line breaks at the end of a line (i.e.,
at 70 or 80 columns).  That is, they prefer to let their editor break
it for them and keep typing right to the end of the *paragraph*.
That's all fine, but when doing a diff, a single letter change
highlights the entire paragraph.  Something that Microsoft Word does
better (IMHO).

Ray