Simultaneous collaborative editing of a LaTeX file

Question

Are there any tools for simultaneous collaborative editing of a .tex file?

The practices I know (and practice) in writing scientific papers are:

• e-mailing each new version to the collaborators,
• working in a same Dropbox folder.

However, both are not meant for simultaneous editing, and are somewhat annoying.

EDIT:

A list is also here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Collaborative_Writing_of_LaTeX_Documents

Answer 1

I tend to use a version control system. My current setup is a (private) repository at Bitbucket, which uses Mercurial for version control. Access to the repository is then provided to other members of the team. This is as close as you can get to simultaneous editing, IMO.

It helps to divide the project into several separate files using e.g. \input or the subfiles package, as this minimizes the number of merge conflicts one encounters.

For actual simultaneous editing, you should use an editor created for this purpose, such as SubEthaEdit.

Answer 2

I don't have much experience with these, but they look like they might do the trick:

Gobby collaborative editor (has built-in chat features)

Or maybe:

LaTeX lab (for Google Docs)

Answer 3

writeLaTeX - writelatex.com

Features:

• no need to register
• collaboration possible, by means of sharing the URL
• documents can be saved, actually everything is saved automatically
• instant compilation on-the-fly
• possibility to upload files (pdf, png, sty, tex, bib, etc.) up to 10 MiB
• syntax highlighting in the included editor

Screenshot:

Answer 4

SpanDeX is an on-line collaborative tool for simultaneous sharing LaTeX documents (in real time), together with version control.

Full, long-term usage of the features offered by SpanDeX requires registration. An informative introductory video describes some of the main features.

Answer 5

Collaborative editing has been implemented in various text editors. I believe I've seen it done with gedit, vim and emacs, but for a large LaTeX document, your best bet is probably to put everything in some kind of version control and split it into multiple files with a single master document that does \input or \include on the individual files.

Answer 6

For real simultaneous work, you might consider any of the etherpad clones (e.g. titanpad). It even has history replay so you can go back and see what you had before. You can even have your own installation. The downside is that it can only do text, and to see the TeX output you would have to compile it somewhere else.

I would definitely recommend some sort of version control. (Even if you were the only author.)

Answer 7

You could all ssh to the same server and use screen or tmux in order for simultaneous access to the entire development environment, allowing you to switch among editors, control versions and run scripts to edit files.

This is different from the other answers (at the time of this writing) because it provides simultaneous access to the whole environment, whereas the other options are just editors (like Gobby) or distributed version control systems (like Mercurial).

If you do this, you'll want some way of viewing the output. One option is just using scp, since you'd be using ssh anyway. If the server is running a web server, you could also just move the files there. When I'm working like this, I tend to run this line a lot.

$ pdflatex foo; bibtex foo; pdflatex foo; pdflatex foo; sudo cp foo.pdf /var/www

Answer 8

Another browser based solution can be found at Online LaTeX Editor which also provides a native Android application called VerbTeX. Both support collaboration and code merging in case of conflicts while working simultaneously on the same document.