I also added a Makefile for mine (LaTeX), and it would add the commit hash to the front page (with an asterisk if the repository had uncommitted changes).
So, if I gave a draft to someone and got feedback, I'd know exactly which revision it was.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
I also added a Makefile for mine (LaTeX), and it would add the commit hash to the front page (with an asterisk if the repository had uncommitted changes).
So, if I gave a draft to someone and got feedback, I'd know exactly which revision it was.
Don't forget to push.
Several times I've lost large chunks of work because I usually copy files from the main folder to backup folders, but occasionally I copy files from a folder that was an old backup, reverting all files everywhere by mistake.
I'm dumb, can someone explain this joke to me? Wtf is a git repo?
Git tracks changes for a folder full of code (aka "repo") between saves (called "commits") so you can revert back to previous versions. It's intended for software but there's nothing stopping you from using it for documents
Thanks!
Okay, I have a question. I would love to write my papers in latex, but none of my colleges use it. Is there a way to reasonably collaborate with coauthors who only use Word and for whom Latex would be confusing and difficult?
Markdown and pandoc are like match made in heaven for this. If you didn’t know, Markdown is plain text file, has a simple syntax for formatting (that gets carried over when you use pandoc), supports LaTeX equations and can attach metadata as yaml part on top of the file (gives custom usability when pandoc works on it) and supports citations w/ a bibliography file. And pandoc is document converter between multiple formats and can produce word files, PowerPoints, html file, latex pdfs (book, report, Beamer presentations) etc. You can also provide a template for pandoc to work with and it produces in that format. Not to mention since it’s plain text, you can apply git version control and also use make files to iteratively compile new outputs.
There is also RMarkdown (or it’s newer successor Quartro), which is same markdown pipeline but also can compute codes inside a section and attaches the result to the markdown file and does the whole pandoc thing afterwards. Think of it as like Jupyter Notebook style of literate programming with Markdown. Here’s a demonstration of its capabilities. https://youtu.be/_D-ux3MqGug
Assuming your colleagues can work with git but not LaTeX, you can set up a git repo with just markdown files and collaborate on that and have a makefile or docker container to get the final word or pdf generated. Here’s a good example of an pandoc makefile https://gist.github.com/kristopherjohnson/7466917
In Worst case scenario that they only work with word files, you can generate one from your markdown files and share with them and pull down the changes they sent you on the word document.
P.S. I assume Org-Mode can also substitute Markdown here in the pipeline. But I haven’t committed to it, so I’m not fully sure.
I wrote about half of my thesis in R Markdown using Git to backup my work. It's fantastic because you can have your plots and statistics integrated directly into your paper and formatting in Markdown is much easier than straight up latex.
R markdown is awesome. I'd always use it for my biostatistics tests and assignments.
Me with Jupyter Notebooks