this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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TeX typesetting

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A place to share ideas, resources, tips, and hacks for Donald Knuths typesetting software TeX. All variants and formats like OpTeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt are welcome.

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I’ve created a very customized LaTeX document which contains portions of machine translated text. I will ask a native speaker to make the text proper. I’m not sure who will take on the task yet, but it’s unlikely to be someone who understands LaTeX. My large preamble would add to the intimidation.

I think overleaf would have normally been ideal. But it became restricted access and hostile toward Tor users a few years ago. I cancel oppressive platforms like that.

One idea is to host it on some arbitary gitea server. They can probably edit the text directly in the web browser of they are a low-tech user. Or if tech-proficient they can use git as it was designed. Doesn’t matter if they butcher the code.. I’ll deal with the cleanup. I guess my main concern is that they would be so alienated by the code that it would put them off this volunteer effort.

Pandoc was one thought: pandoc -o paper.md -f latex -t markdown paper.tex, in which case they would work in a less alien situation. But pandoc can’t even handle my 2-column doc. It falls over on a tabular and produces nothing. But even if it could produce results, I’d expect disaster anyway.

Probably no great answers here.

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[–] propter_hog@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think git is a good solution for this, especially since you just need the other person to edit a natural language, not the LaTeX. You can do your coding locally after pulling their updates.

[–] evenwicht 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Perhaps.

One thing I find irritating with git is how it handles blobs. The doc has lot of small graphical images which do not need version control, but they need to exist along side the controlled objects. I will have to put them under version control just to get them in the same area.

I might still try latex2rtf, if the collaborator terns out to be quite low tech. But I guess I should have low expectations of a 2 column doc coming out well.

[–] propter_hog@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago

I've never had to do a paper with lots of graphics like that, so yeah, that would be a weird one.