Authorea

Arin Basu deleted file WhyThis.md over 9 years ago

Commit id: 1a41db96bfe35ec59c4277606db88a815a446383

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## A Note about why I have used Authorea and not Word to Write this ### Need to set up a simple collaborative workspace but not too many Word documents As we have a diverse group of academics (with various levels of engagement and involvement) in our Public Health Group here, I thought rather than having series of "Word" documents with commented markups being shared around, can we try something a little different but one that would nevertheless allow us to write and save and share our versions in _one_ document and we can each contribute as and how we liked? In my brief research, it turned out that for scholarly and not so scholarly writings, academic collaborative writing and tools are currently a hot area of research and development. This particular document is one such prototype. ### This format is much simpler This is based on plain text: something we use on our emails every day. It's really really simple, and it just formats itself. In this sense, compared with what-you-see-is-what-you-type familiarity with Word, etc, ths is simpler. Just keep writing using plain text and focus on the content. I can explain this format later when we meet. Basically, everything is on your browser. Generally, headers are just written in the form of the numbers of hashes # as needed. Bullet points are likewise written with asterisks, and lists of numbers are just that. When you need to add images, just click insert image (see where it says "Insert Figure" if you hover on the section and it will prompt you to add image and captions). and add images. All formatting needs to prettify the document is taken care of by the software here, and also all version changes are available from the history link above. Citations can be added by directly searching from the document and we do not *need* Endnote if we do not want to (but there are ways in which Endnote can be integrated with this). For example, if you click on the top + sign, it will lead to a drop down box from where you can search and add citations. If you click on "Insert" below (the left-most link), you can add chunks of text.