Spaced Out ::

If you’ve read any of my blog entries over the last year, then you will realise that I’m a regular LaTeX user, primarily for typesetting at the Journal of Maps. Until recently I had never used LaTeX for writing a research article for submission to a journal. And my initial experiences are that I won’t repeat it!! Much of my academic writing with co-authors is performed remotely. It is therefore essential, when sending a manuscript back, to keep versions and identify where any changes have been made. MS Office (and Open Office for that matter) both have change tracking and it is a simple matter to work through the changes, accepting or rejecting them. LaTeX is a typesetting system and, as far as I’m aware, is not designed for versioning. Thats not to say it isn’t possible with PDFs (and I would be interested to hear of any LaTeX packages that might help this process) as Adobe Acrobat Pro has long supported annotating PDFs. However PDFs are not the source programme and you then need to reintegrate these changes in to the original file. It’s fine for sending proofs to authors, but not good when writing a paper. This whole process was brought home when a reviewer for one paper I submitted noted that the paper felt rushed and slightly disjointed. This wasn’t intentional but, having looked back at the paper, was a result of “round-tripping” the article using LaTeX. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has experiences along these lines.