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Comment by mhartl | Hacker News Reader

Softcover handles Markdown + embedded LaTeX on your local machine (no 'net connection required) using a standard text editor and web browser:

http://softcover.io/

I use Softcover to write and maintain both the code-heavy Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/book) and the math-heavy Tau Manifesto (http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto). (Disclosure: I'm also the principal author of Softcover.)

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I just watched your video and I think your tool is exactly what I'm looking for! Downloading it now.

In the meantime, I was wondering if you ever compose on your iPad? What is your workflow for that?

Using Softcover requires a standard shell & text editor, which I doubt is available on iPad. But it works great as a de facto second monitor, as described [here](http://manual.softcover.io/book/getting_started#sec-html_sof...).

Oh well, I was hoping I'd missed something. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing now -- write it in Evernote and then copy/paste when I get back to a computer.

I've found Simplenote on the iPad and Notational Velocity or nvALT on a Mac to be a really lightweight and quick workflow. Plus, there's the added benefit of it all being plain text, whereas Evernote always seems to make guesses about unwanted formatting for me.

Here's an iPad app that does Markdown + LaTeX: http://eqeditor.com/writer/ and then outputs HTML, ePub, etc. Not sure if it's exactly what you need but there you go.

Is the HTML generation with backlinks from an external lib or custom built for softcover? I'm working on a CMS and this would be fantastic to use as a module for writing articles.

Not sure exactly what you mean by "backlinks", but most of the software is custom-built.

ah. backlink = back references, Figure 1.1 and link to the Figure 1.1 :)

What your license for the project? If we wanted to use it, we'd porting it to Go and JS with our own stylized CSS.

Cross-references are all custom. License is MIT. [1] Porting would likely be a huge PITA.

[1]: http://github.com/softcover/softcover

That's seriously cool.

Had I had something like that some years ago, my workflow for both my BSc and my MSc thesis would have been quite different.

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