Collaborative cross-platform writing

For several courses at the university, we’ve got projects going on (actually, 5 simultaneously…) and for most of them, we have to write fairly large documents. We also have to work in groups of 2, 3 or 5. So collaborative writing becomes a necessity. Finally, in the group of 5, we work on 4 different operating systems. So whichever solution we pick, it must seamlessly work on any platform as well.

We chose LyX.

• LyX is a WYSIWYM GUI to write LaTeX documents.
• LyX is written in Qt, a cross-platform GUI toolkit (the most awesome one, if you ask me!), which makes it possible to use it on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• To make LyX collaborative, we use the SVN version control system (which is also cross-platform).

This is how we started. But some problems emerged:

1. Line endings are different
   Linux/Mac OS X uses \n line endings, Windows uses \r\n. As a result, when a person on Windows made changes to one part of the document and a person on Linux made changes in a different part of the document, their changes would no longer merge! No more collaborative (simultaneous) writing!
   After asking in #latex — where a nice guy hinted that SVN could enforce a certain line ending — the problem was quickly resolved.
   Solution: go to your working copy’s root directory and execute the following command: svn propset -R svn:eol-style LF .
2. Generated PDFs are not always screen-readable
   The PDFs that LyX generates (through pdflatex) look okay-ish, but blurry, on both Mac OS X and Linux. They look like total crap on Windows — or at least in Adobe Reader.
   Solution: Go to LyX → Preferences → Output → LaTeX → TeX encoding and enter “OT1” instead of “T1”. If you now export to PDF, the fonts will be much more readable on screen!
3. Cross-references as hyperlinks in PDFs
   I think everybody likes links within documents, i.e. from the table of contents to the corresponding pages, from cross-references to the sections they reference. Since LyX 1.6, you can configure this from within LyX!
   Solution Go to LyX → Document → Settings → PDF Properties and check the “Use hyperref support” checkbox.
   In the optional “Additional options” input field, I entered this: linkcolor=blue, citecolor=black, urlcolor=blue, filecolor=blue, pdftex.

The result of this is that you can work together on the same document, each working simultaneously but on different sections, from any OS and generate hyperlinked PDFs that look awesome both in print and on screen, again on any OS. Yay! :)