A Community Of More Than 1M | Hacker News Reader

A Community Of More Than 1M

sharelatex.com

96 pointsbeck525 comments

Awesome to see that they have grown so much. I've used ShareLaTeX since 2013 and really love it. The sharing functions are great, no need to install and manage a LaTeX installation and all plugins is just awesome. Their support pages are awesome also, whenever I google for stuff like "center align image latex" it's either some StackExchange page or their support page that's the top results.

Can't recommend it enough!

I used MiKTeX LaTeX for my thesis, so I had to learn - as many other PhD candidates - some of the troubles with this typesetting system the hard way.

I had a quick look at ShareLateX in order to help my sister with her latex experience. While I can not say anything about larger documents, the ease of DVI previewing in the browser, etc, it for sure gave me the opportunity to debug some of her code in small pieces, test out LaTeX example code, and share the results with my sister.

Nice project - best of luck and keep up the good work!

Edit: for typos

I've used this service a few times and have to say it's fantastic. Compared to setting up LaTeX on a mac to manipulate a few docs every now and then, it's a dream.

Just FYI, LaTeX on the Mac is just one `brew cask install mactex` away.

Of course, the collaboration features of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf are great. We wrote two of our last papers with Overleaf.

I'm using sharelatex since about 4 years for all my papers and even my PhD thesis. It's really convenient when writing with many co-authors.

The way we pay practically $0 for infinity authors and projects is, we have only one payed account and this one invites everyone else.

One thing I miss is the annotation feature google-docs provides. However, the /todo packages is kinda helpful.

Regarding the annotation features of Google Docs, this is something we're beta testing at the moment: https://www.sharelatex.com/beta/participate. Come and give it a shot and let us know what you think!

I wonder how many of those 1M users pay? I saw that it's free for personal use.

I can't give exact numbers, but we have a conversion rate in the (very) low single digits. It's plenty to support our costs and development team though (we're purposefully optimised for a healthy cash-flow positive business, rather than for massive growth). Our churn rate is pretty terrible compared to what most people would look for in a SAAS app, but that makes sense when you consider the academic yearly cycle, and that a lot of people only use LaTeX for a short period in their life while they are a student.

Do you have numbers on your active users?

Around 200,000 monthly active users.

The collaboration features, only available on paid plans, are really powerful, especially when collaborating with "casual" LaTeX users. The Google Drive-esque experience is comfortable for even the most non-expert friends of mine. But I also wonder how many use these paid plans, they do though give large discounts to students.

If you haven't seen, we're about to make these collaboration features even more powerful! Come join the beta if you're interested: https://www.sharelatex.com/beta/participate

LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation (letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.

Its included in nearly every *nix system and generally syntax is much easier to handle (a doc with no syntax embedded still produces reasonable results).

Notwithstanding the wonderful 'mom' package, its shame development has seemed to dry up.

LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation (letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.

I had my troff phase, but I don't see why I'd want to write troff directly for simpler documents if I can just write in org-mode or Markdown and convert it to a myriad of formats (including LaTeX and HTML). With org-mode I can also run inline code snippets, feed tables directly to gnuplot, use org-mode's todo/agenda functionality, etc.

A tex document with no "syntax" embedded also produces reasonable results.

For simple projects I do not even write tex code directly. I write in org-mode and export. So I wouldn't be opposed to using groff for typesetting if it produced high quality output.

But whenever I'm preparing for publication I always end up manually tweaking many things for latex. There are a lot of things TeX does automatically perfectly well. Typesetting paragraphs is one of them. But overall page layout always requires manual work in my experience. Does groff make this manual work easier?

I think that the more markup you have to insert, the value is left in working with latex. It's a big uphill climb until you have a usable template, I guess.

Agreed. The benefit of troff system is: (a) If you only need to add minimal markup (occasional .PP .B .I), (b) the fact its everywhere, (c) because of "A", no IDE / Editor needed

That is to say, for minimal jobs its great - if you need to extend effort go LaTeX

Why on earth is the users graph tilted, unless of course the number of users suddenly hit zero on the first of January.

I've noticed this same error elsewhere recently. I'm wondering if it's an MS Excel thing, or similar?

To recapitulate: the end of the graph shows the value for the final date on the x-axis as zero. This gives the appearance that the graph has been rotated a few degrees anti-clockwise.

It wouldn't surprise me. ExHell makes it incredible easy to make the shoddiest of plots.

Question for jpallen if you're still reading - do you plan to support unicode fonts? I write some documents using the Sanskrit2003 font and compile them with xelatex locally. Wondering if sharelatex plans to support non-commercial unicode fonts?

Do the instructions at https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2013/04/02/using-your-favour... work for you? We've supported unicode and XeLaTeX for a while now, so what you've described should work, but it's hard to say without specifics (LaTeX can be difficult with these sort of edge cases, but if something is broken, please send us a small example to support@sharelatex.com and we can take a look).

Great thank you

What does bootstrapped mean in this context?

We haven't taken any VC funding

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