Here are two really cool LaTeX tools every astronomer should enjoy.
ShareLaTeX is an online LaTeX writing tool. It’s great for collaboratively writing LaTeX documents of any size, and a life-saver when you don’t have access to your own laptop with a TeX installation on it — just grab a web browser, navigate to ShareLaTeX and write away, then grab the PDF product. (You can also chat with collaborators, browse revisions, and a bunch of other useful niceties.)
The folks behind ShareLaTeX generously announced today that they made their product open-source. Here is the GitHub page with their source code. It appears to be extremely easy to run your own local installation, if you so desire.
While working on a grant application (in the old, inefficient fashion: on a Dropbox shared folder) I wished there was some way to send “diffs” of my changes to the PDF to my collaborators, in order to save them the time to hunt for the changed word or sentence. Emery Berger’s blog directed me to the latexdiff tool, which I had somehow never heard about! It’s quite easy to install (if you use MacPorts, it’s a simple sudo port install latexdiff), and the resulting PDF diffs are nice and clear.
