Are there any tools for simultaneous collaborative editing of a .tex file?
The practices I know (and practice) in writing scientific papers are:
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
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.
subfiles heuristic.
Commented
Apr 20, 2017 at 19:40
I would suggest https://www.sharelatex.com/.
The part which you would find interesting part is below:
[...ShareLaTeX..]
A LaTeX Editor for smooth collaboration
Keep your LaTeX collaborators up to date by letting everyone access and edit the same LaTeX document.
The days of making sure everyone has access to the latest version are over; the latest version is always available online. You can even work on the document at the same time as your collaborators with our real-time editor, and our built in chat will help you communicate while you're editing.
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:
I'd say Authorea (full disclosure, I am a co-founder). Authorea is an online social word processor for the collaborative writing of research articles. It solves the problem that many scholars have when they tell their co-authors: "please do not touch the article, I am working on it". In Authorea, articles are modular (e.g. one module = one section). Only one article collaborator can check out and work on a module at any time, so that the entire article stays open for editing but individual elements are checked out and then checked back in with edits.
More information: Authorea's versioning control system is entirely based on Git (every article is a Git repository). But Git functions in the backend, so that users who are not familiar with (or do not care about) Git can just use it as an editor and still have all changes logged as commits. In other words, Authorea allows power users (who know Git) to easily write papers in collaboration with regular users (who don't know Git). Authorea's frontend allows you to enter text in LaTeX or Markdown, as well as figures, and equations (in LaTeX or MathML). Authorea renders and compiles everything to the web (HTML5), in addition to PDF (export to numerous journal formats is provided).
Sagemath Cloud allows you to do all kind of stuff -- one of them is to have a two pane view of the source and a rendered view of the latex document. All edits can be done collaboratively in real-time; it uses the differential sync algorithm.
Bonus on top of similar solutions: You have a Linux environment, which allows you to not only store and process files, but also to write your own scripts to generate content and whatnot ...
It also have inverse and forward search, scales well to large documents (100+ pages), and takes frequent snapshots of all files.
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.
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
I like to use git combined with git-latexdiff to nicely visualize changes.
Everyone editing should just make a different branch. Finally the lead author can just merge branches and go ahead with the compiled document including all the changes.
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.)
I’m the creator of Codr, a collaborative code editor for the web. I created Codr because I couldn’t find a “Google Docs for Code” product that met the following criteria:
Built for code. Codr supports over 100 programming languages (including LaTex).
100% collaborative. Every cursor move and selection change as well as edits are instantly relayed to all users.
Blindingly fast.
I'm hopeful that Codr is more or less what you are looking for. Codr has been in development for over a year and the core features are complete. I'm launching a Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday to bring it to the finish line.
Check out the campaign video at http://codr.io or follow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/CodrEditor.
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.
If you have any concern about confidentiality, you may try to host an installation of https://github.com/geier/ethertex yourself (suggested by FSMaxB in his question Selfhosted collaborative webbased LaTeX editor).
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