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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love ShareLaTeX. It's one of the few products that is kind of niche but does one thing and does it really well. I definitely get $8 a month worth out of their service. Having used MacTeX and similar products, ShareLaTeX is just a much smoother user experience. Not to mention their documentation is great and really gets to the point of what you are often trying to do. I've used their service on the last three research papers I've written and have been sharing the platform with different professors I work with.

(I sound like a shill, but check my comment history — I'm not affiliated with them. Just a happy customer.)

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Personally I just can't get used to using a slow web app. I much prefer working in a native editor or IDE (like TeXStudio). I still use Sharelatex in a pinch, when I'm another machine or something, but I breathe a sigh of relief when I'm back on a native app.

One of my favourite feature of Overleaf (another cloud LaTeX Editor) is that I can use git to work on my cloud project on my local machine. It seems to me the best of both worlds.

I didn't know that! That does seem like a sweet feature. I'll try it out next time I need to use these services.

You can also sync to github with ShareLaTeX, so this workflow would work too.

Thanks, you would be surprised what a big difference it makes when we hear nice things about ShareLaTeX. (I am a ShareLaTeX person)

You are doing great work.

But what I cannot understand is, how you still recommend stuff like $$ in a new beginners guide in 2017.

I had several moments in this tutorial where I thought: Oh, god. This got deprecated 20 years ago.

Out of curiosity, what should I use instead? And what are some tutorials that promote more modern techniques?

\begin{equation} ... \end{equation}. Finding modern resources to learn LaTeX (and indeed TeX for macros etc) has been a perennial difficulty for me!

Or \[ ... \] for unnumbered equations.

I would use

  \begin{equation*}
    ...
  \end{equation*}

for consistency and ease of switching between numbered and unnumbered.

It's true, finding modern LaTeX tutorials is even harder that modern c++. It shares many of the same problems.

We put together a LaTeX course (in german) for physics student every year and keep it up to date with best practices as much as possible: http://toolbox.pep-dortmund.org/files/archive/latest/latex.p...

FWIW, it's not just ShareLaTeX... I learned LaTeX a few years ago and through the tutorials and resources I used I learned the `$$` syntax. I'm a very infrequent user, but this is the first I've heard that it was depreciated at all, let alone 20 years ago.

I do support OP's thoughts that a 'modern' LaTeX solution like ShareLaTeX should encourage best practices though.

Seeng the joy with LaTeX:

  LaTeX users significantly more often reported to enjoy
  their work with their respective software than Word
  users (t (36.27) = -3.23, p <. 01).

From: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

You are not alone. :-)

Agreed. I just finished a paper on ShareLaTeX today. Absolutely love it.

Looks great. I don't publish but use LaTeX for presentations (with beamer), with LaTeXila. Do you recomend ShareLaTeX for that use case as well?

Beamer works just fine on shareLaTeX. I've never had a problem.

Another unaffiliated happy customer here, ShareLaTeX is awesome.

And it's open source to boot!

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