[Tex/LaTex] Alternatives to git for sharing latex projects

gitsharelatex

I am trying to set up a collaborative LaTeX project – something better than sending emails back and forth. Some sort of version control system: git or mercurial – seems popular, but it means learning a new system, and quite frankly I find git very confusing. Also it's probably overkill. And at the moment I don't really have the time to invest in learning a new system, so I'm hoping for something simpler.

I don't know that sharelatex, writelatex, authorea will work, as we use lots of LaTeX packages such as TiKZ, sagetex etc. So we really need some system – easy to use and set up – which allows us to share documents. Clearly some sort of version control system would be perfect – if there was one which was straightforward to use.

I have attempted a start with git, and I created a repository and committed it to bitbucket. But that took half a day of fiddling with ssh keys and searching for information, and I'm not sure that I want to spend half a day for every beginner's step with git. So I'm wondering if there's something simpler – in this case for just two collaborators.

Best Answer

You still will have to know some VCS-magic anyway for any VCS of choice
Git is really terrible choice as first VCS (and last or any other number too)
TeXstudio isn't a bad editor per se, has built-in support for SVN (which can be "cheated" for using Git - or Mercurial - with the same interface)
Alternative solution assumes using hand-work (but it will be nothing more than 2-3 Mercurial commands in the worst case of mandatory merges) with any authoring tool... maybe TortoiseHG will be good choice for you instead of pure CLI

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] git LaTeX and branches workflow

I hesitate to say this, but I think you're doing it wrong; but you're close to what is, I think, needed.

The purpose of a branch is to separate an activity, not a structural component.

Thus, I would not have a branch for the "Introduction" file, but for the process "Develop the Introduction". This branch might include, for example, changes not only to Introduction.tex but also to Preamble.tex (\usepackage{todonotes}, maybe) and to Master.tex (\input{Introduction}, maybe).

That said, I suspect this is only useful if you're working as part of a team -- one doing the intro, one doing chapters 1-3, one doing chapters 4-8, for example.

As a solitary author, the way I work is this (I use git):

To a first approximation, one repo per document
A master branch which represents the life of the "public" document (also known as a "release" branch)
If you really need it, a development branch where you accumulate other branches before release
Ad-hoc branches for specific major items of work (eg "I'm moving from Komascript to Memoir")
But normal day-to-day evolution (eg just plodding along adding paragraphs) I do on the master branch or, if I need one, the development branch.
Frequent commits of bite-sized changes (eg It may be useful to separate the commits for the preamble separately
Try to obey the maxim "Don't commit a broken version" (I try but I don't always succeed)
Use tagging extensively to keep notes on what a given point in the graph means

Where I am building documents that go out to clients, I also do something strange:

Commit everything when the document is ready (but not the direct PDF)
After the commit, format the document anew and check it (this brings in my git commit reference for my dogfooded gitinfo)
Rename the PDF output to, say, client.2013-03-19.pdf, and move it to a folder called "archive", also somewhere in the repo
Stage and commit the date-specific PDF, and tag that commit appropriately.

This answer, I hope, may also be helpful: Automatic branching for versions and git

[Tex/LaTex] LaTeX + GIT – mark differences since specific commit

I've done this with a combination of git show and latexdiff. One caveat: this is for single-file documents, might be more complicated if you have split the document into several files and used \input/\include.

Start by getting the version of a file from a previous commit, with
```
git show <commit>:filename.tex > tmp.tex
```
Run latexdiff to generate a new .tex file with the differences highlighted:
```
latexdiff tmp.tex filename.tex > tmpdiff.tex
```
Compile tmpdiff.tex as usual.

For git show you need to specify the complete path in the repository I think, so if it is placed in a subfolder you need path/to/filename.tex.

I wrote a script to automate this somewhat, and also clean up leftovers. Admittedly, I haven't used this much yet, but it may be a starting point.

#!/bin/bash    
git show $1:file.tex > tmp.tex
latexdiff tmp.tex file.tex > tmpdiff.tex
latexmk -pdf -interaction=nonstopmode tmpdiff.tex
mv -v tmpdiff.pdf Diffed.pdf
rm -v tmp.tex tmpdiff.*

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] git LaTeX and branches workflow

[Tex/LaTex] LaTeX + GIT – mark differences since specific commit

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