Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

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

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Raymond Wan writes:
>  > I don't know how many authors it supports, but surely at least 3
>  > (i.e., comes down to number of coloring schemes).
>
> I believe it works for you, but it definitely doesn't for us.  I
> suppose if somebody would go to the trouble of actually teaching all
> the faculty how to avoid breaking each others' edits.... :-(  And both
> LibreOffice and OpenOffice seem to crash more often on Mac when either
> change logging or comments are enabled.
>
> Comments do work, and that's kind of convenient.  But -- I don't like
> them (why are you not surprised? ;-), because they go into a sidebar,
> making the window much wider.  It would be easy enough in LaTeX to
> define a \comment macro to be used like this:
>
> \comment{steve}{I just don't believe this crap!}
>
> that can be switched on or off in the preview output, and highlighting
> and special commands for convenient use in Emacs or vim when editing
> source.


Throwing all those comments in the sidebar *is* annoying and one thing
I love about LaTeX is that you can hide comments in the source; a
great place for me to put research notes that are for me but not for
the final PDF file.

I think one nice thing about Word is that if you have Track Changes
turned on, it indicates the changes without you doing anything more.
That is something it has over LaTeX.  Of course, someone could write a
post-processing script that takes the two LaTeX files (i.e., before
and after changes that I've added) and outputs one with
\comment{...}{...} added in auto-magically.  I guess that is what's
missing.  Maybe someone has done it already and I just need to look...

Ray

PS:  Thanks for the tip about git!  I'm a bit busy now to change my
workflow but when I have some time, I'll take a look at it.