offer a subscription feature with useful extensions and various sharing permissions, and some offer free-to-use versions with basic tools that are sufficient for a broad variety of applications, up to and including writing a complete academic paper with coauthors. Cloud-based implementations of LaTeX have several advantageous features for teams compared to classic desktop installations. First, because they are hosted completely online, they avoid the inevitable troubleshooting required to set up a LaTeX installation on various personal computers run by different members of a team. Second, they typically maintain a single, continuously synced copy of the document so that different writers do not create conflicted or out-of-sync copies or need to deal with Git themselves to maintain that sync. Third, they typically allow collaborators to edit documents simultaneously, although different services vary the number of collaborators and documents allowed at each subscription tier. Fourth, some implementations provide a “rich text” editor that behaves similarly to familiar tools like Word, so that collaborators can write text directly into the document without worrying too much about the underlying LaTeX coding. Cloud services usually offer a convenient selection of templates so it is easy to start a project and see results right away without knowing a lot of the code that controls document formatting. Cloud-based implementations of LaTeX also have disadvantages. Some up-front learning is still required, except when using the rich text editor. Continuous access to the internet is necessary, and updating figures and tables may require a file upload that can be tough to automate. Although some services offer ways to track changes and even to integrate a Git workflow, version control is not as straightforward as using Git locally. Finally, cloud-based services also vary dramatically in their ability to integrate with file systems that store code and code outputs, and it is necessary to practice an integrated workflow depending on what is available. Some teams adopt cloud-based tools as a permanent solution, although DIME recommends shifting eventually to local editing and compiling using tools such as TexStudio, while using Git for version control. See box 7.2 for the workflow adopted by the Demand for Safe Spaces team.
BOX 7.2 PUBLISHING RESEARCH PAPERS AND REPORTS: A CASE STUDY FROM THE DEMAND FOR SAFE SPACES PROJECT The Demand for Safe Spaces project produced a policy brief and a working paper, among other outputs. The policy brief was produced in accordance with the DIME communications protocols. For its production, the graphs exported by R and Stata were saved in .eps format and shared with a designer who
adapted them to fit DIME’s visual identity. The research paper was written in LaTeX through the Overleaf platform and was published as World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9269 (Kondylis et al. 2020).
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DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH IN PRACTICE: THE DIME ANALYTICS DATA HANDBOOK
