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How do I make it possible for my supervisor to edit my thesis while using LaTeX? I submit a pdf document but they want to edit it.... how do I do this without switching to MS Word?

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I'm not sure there is a good answer here, but the normal advice from those of us who do have mixed workflows is realism. If you have to provide Word output on a regular basis, particularly to your boss, then use Word and do a good job with it. – Joseph Wright♦ Sep 4 '12 at 8:41
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A workaround: choose another supervisor... ;-) – Paul Gaborit Sep 4 '12 at 9:00
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As a supervisor I would never edit a thesis: it's not my work, but the student's. – egreg Sep 4 '12 at 9:08
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@egreg We don't know in this case, but many people see PDFs as print-and-read only, and only know the Track Changes approach in Word for commenting at all in an electronic form. – Joseph Wright♦ Sep 4 '12 at 9:57
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@JosephWright Imho egreg is right: I too do find the idea that a supervisor wants to edit a thesis horrific. Isn't the student claiming at the start that he/she wrote the thesis alone? A supervisor can get a print and make annotations. Or a pdf and make annotations. But he should not edit the document. A thesis is not a teamwork. – Ulrike Fischer Sep 4 '12 at 10:41
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6 Answers

up vote 27 down vote accepted

You need to talk to your supervisor to find out what he is willing to do. Then you need to modify your work flow to achieve that. If he is willing to read/edit raw/uncompiled LaTeX in MS Word, then that is easy. Just import your LaTeX files into MS Word.

If he is okay with the occasional bit of LaTeX markup, but not too much, then maybe you need to do citations and cross referencing by hand, but leave things like \section. This means having a really good preamble is important and thinking about each piece of markup you use.

If he wants to see the finished product complete with formating in MS Word, then it is probably best to use MS Word.

I tend to find that if I use good citation keys and keep the markup to a minimum people are willing to ignore the little bit of LaTeX. If they cannot ignore the LaTeX, then I either switch to Word or ask them to markup a hard copy.

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up vote 31 down vote

I get pretty many people convinced to edit the PDF either with "PDFXchangeviewer", which you can download for free (but it isn't open source), or using "PDF Annotator", which is used widely in the academic area.

With both it is easy and can even be fun to annotate texts. And there is one large advantage to word & co: You can see at the first glance, whether something was added.

To reasure my readers that their respective annotations have been included, I either use the perlscript "latexdiff" to display the changes, or I use a version control system like git, and e.g. latexdiff-git (I'll provide the link later).

So there are two steps:

  1. Get your supervisor to annotate the PDF;
  2. reassure him/her, that the comments are not lost.

So if you are in the position to negotiate, argue to give it a try.

EDIT: According to the comment below, the supervisor seems to accept writing into a PDF. Regarding the second step, I found it very usefull to have a version control system like git, which took some hours (no more) to learn the very low level it needs to control a book. The main advantage is that you can compare any version with the present version. About the necessary steps see here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/44092/4736

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Good advice. I helped them install a pdf reader which allows easy annotation with a range of tools and they are now happy. I'm very lucky to have a supervisor who is willing to read at least part of my thesis... Let me check 'latexdiff' – HCAI Sep 5 '12 at 22:32
up vote 7 down vote

This will likely get downvoted, but I think the best answer is to use Word. Making it so that your supervisor may feel frustrated dealing with your thesis is a very bad idea. Be glad your supervisor is willing to edit it, rather than just making notes on a hard copy that you are going to have to put into the file yourself. In my experience that is unusual.

I think if you do something that frustrates your supervisor and is likely going to be a continuing issue you are asking for trouble.

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up vote 4 down vote

Submit the .tex file to people with little computer skills that only know the Word (or a similar WYSIWYG) it's just a bad idea. Probably even convert to plain text (detex foo.tex foo.txt plain text or pdftotext foo.pdf foo.txt) is not a good idea. There are people that simply not know how to handle a txt file. Others are able to open with the default text editor or even import to Word, but will be scared by the plain format, overall because the right margins (before of editing ...). Imagine the face of these people seening also \emph{some} trivial LaTeX code.

Probably a better (better, not good) solution is convert the .tex to HTML, RTF or ODF formats with some of the available tools. This is a task relatively trivial for LyX users. Hopefully is this way you can export tables and images as well. Although these formats are supported by Word, it could better save as .doc with Word (or OpenOffice, Abiword, etc.) and enable Word version control before submitting (or ask your supervisor to mark the comments in some form).

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If you enable track changes in the word document before sending it to your supervisor you don't have to worry about if they understand it. If their technical level is low enough, also default the view to Final (vs Final: Show Markup) to avoid confusing them with Word's change tracking markup while still recording all their edits. Alternately Word 2010 has a decent multi-pane diff view for .doc files. I think it was added in W2007. – Dan Neely Sep 4 '12 at 15:23
@DanNeeely, thanks for the clarification. I really did not want to give any tips on Word. In Windows period I used reluctantly only when it was the undisputed fact standard (aka WordPerfect extinction-level event) but soon I switched to Linux where I've managed between antiword and StartOffice or successors for interact with Word users. – Fran Sep 4 '12 at 20:04
up vote 4 down vote

If you are familiar with Emacs you might want to consider using Org mode. The built in exporters make it easy to produce both Latex and Open Office documents (which you can convert to Word) from the same plain text source file.

I've used this approach successfully (albeit for shorter documents than a thesis) when I needed to produce files for both printing and electronic submission.

For reference the export section of the org mode manual is http://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html and there was a discussion about how to write a thesis using Org mode on the Org mailing list here.

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up vote 0 down vote

Latex file source is plain ascii and it should not pose any difficulty for your Prof to read contents. As for styling, ask his opinion first and try to implement accordingly in Latex and impress him with an output better than his MS Word could do!

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Sorry for being rude, but in the reality, it does not work this way. People either want to read raw code (and then they use LaTeX) or they don't (and then they want you to sumbit in Word). As well, I cannot imagine that I tell my boss: "Here is the TeX source, everything you need is in there." – tohecz Sep 4 '12 at 9:02
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@tohecz I'd tell my supervisor: "This is my work; I'll gladly implement any suggestion you're going to make." – egreg Sep 4 '12 at 9:11
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@egreg The point here is that the supervisor has no idea how to make suggestions without using Word. I simply print the file and use a pencil to correct something, but many other people want to use Word for corrections. (The pencil method got out-of-fashion today, I guess). – Marco Sep 4 '12 at 10:06
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@Marco There is a difference between "making suggestions" and "correcting". Should the supervisor be allowed to rewrite a paragraph? To correct an equation? To correct the spelling? To add a citation? If the supervisor wants to write down suggestions he can use word. But he should use another document and not touch the original thesis. – Ulrike Fischer Sep 4 '12 at 11:04
@UlrikeFischer IMO it really comes down to what is done with the edits/markup. A blanket accept of everything without looking at it is bad; but if the edits are in the form of "you misspelled X", or "you need a comma here"; making the correction directly to the original will take less time for the reviewer to do and not require any integration afterwards. "X is confusing, if what you mean is Y to clarify it I suggest changes A, B, and C" is often clearer if done as an in place edit. If it was confusing enough that the reviewer misunderstood you writing, a rewrite is probably needed anyway. – Dan Neely Sep 4 '12 at 17:16
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