I am a great fan of TeX, LaTeX and LyX, but recently I wrote some minutes and then tried to send them off for other people to review.
There was no way I could send a TeX file; no-one would know what to do with it. In the end I sent a PDF, but most people were unable to work out how to annotate it (or had an old version of Adobe Reader that didn't allow it).
Some people said they were annoyed that I hadn't just sent it in Word so that they could put their corrections in with "track changes". I suspect they thought that I had used TeX to confuse them, to make it harder for them to make corrections.
My question is:
How can I use TeX with other people
who are not TeX literate so that they
can make reasonable corrections to
text, without me ever having to explain to them
what TeX is? If possible, how
can I allow them to produce and
distribute a finished document after
they have changed it (without any
further intervention by me), like one would a Word document?
P.S: I want to stress that I am trying to avoid being annoying for people. An ideal solution would have to involve nothing novel for anyone to be confused by, or think I was being awkward. I realise this requirement removes rather a lot of my options.
Best Answer
If everyone has Word, you can edit your Latex source directly in Word, allowing you to please your colleagues by using Word's change tracking, which is still the best out there.
Using source highlighting can make this editing more pleasant. I describe a workflow for this in another answer. Because change tracking highlights (not altogether consistently) Latex, it is fairly easy for people not familiar with Latex to identify which parts of the document are text and which are markup.
It's kind of sad that the best solution to change tracking for Latex is to import it into Word. The above workflow can be used with any editor that allows you to use change tracking on HTML, which includes Open Office Writer and supposedly Lyx, but I've had trouble with both of these. Word also has a rather good spell checker.