Re: Single user vs Multi-user collaboration
I think multi-user editing is fine at an /early/ stage, so that the multi-tude can throw in remarks, add paragraphs, subsections, or whatever according to their own interests or responsibilities. The ghastly -- but hopefully fairly complete -- soup could then be cleaned up by one chosen author, with comments (but not editting) by the others.
Although now sometime in the past, I'm still scarred by the time both I and my phd supervisor made significant, in parallel, and notationally incompatible changes to a reasonably advanced latex document. The resulting manual merging process was not very fun. So now, apart from any early "soup" stages that might arise from using (eg) overleaf, I tend to either take control of a manuscript, or stand back and make comments while someone else does.
I'm very picky who I might send any latex files to. I use a system of line breaks and indents to keep it readable (especially for equations), and allow useful diffs between versions. This is frequently mangled by the editors of others, which usually either insist on re-formatting lines so they have similar lengths, or turn each paragraph into one long unbroken line.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
