[texhax] Word vs. LaTeX questions (was latex in social sciences?)

[Yuri Robbers]

Hi Peter,

On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 17:27 -0400, Peter Flom wrote:
> This thread spurs me to ask two questions that I was going to ask at
Practical TeX.
> 
> 1.  Using Word and Procite (a bibliography package) offers one thing
that I haven't found in
> LaTeX.  While typing along, you want to cite a work that is entered in
your bibliography file.
> You can cite it using any of the fields and any part of the
fields.....for example, if I wanted to cite
> a work by Karl, but only knewe that it had the author Berry and the
word LaTeX, I could
> hit alt-t, then enter, then    berry latex   and it would bring up
every item in my bibliography that had
> both these things. 

Under UNIX and UNIX-like OS's, including Mac OS X (and probably also
under Windows using the cygwin libraries) there's emacs and xemacs, in
which you have a program called RefTeX available, which offers similar
functionality. In addition there's a couple of dedicated bibiolgraphy
management programs available, that can work with the BibTeX format.
Bibview is one of them, Pybliographer another. Pybliographer also has
the option to connect to online literature databases, free ones, as well
as the subscription-based ones that universities and research institutes
often offer their exployees access to.

> This is really kind of neat
> 
> 2.  Another thing that can be done in Word is track changes.  If one
has to work with several co-authors,
> this is kind of nice.  Since there are a lot of academic-types using
LaTeX, I imagine this issue comes up a lot.
> What do people do?

I use Subversion, again that's UNIX (etc.) based. That is a system that
can be used to automatically keep track of changes to your documents,
programs, etc. It is processor time- and diskspace-efficient, and allows
multiple users (even hundreds or thousands) to cooperate on a project.
It is fully network-capable, so there is no need for users to be in the
same physical location. It even has ways of dealing with concurrent
changes to the project. 

Subversion has some predecessors such as CVS (Concurrent Version System)
and RCS (Revision Control System) that are also still being used.
Especially CVS is still in very wide use. 

Cheers,
Yuri.