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Comment by JohnHammersley | Hacker News Reader

This is great to see, although it sounds like it's still somewhat in beta. Be interesting to find out if they support packages such as amsmath, either now or in the future.

As a shameless plug, for anyone wanting to use LaTeX without having to install everything locally, the online compilers Overleaf [1] and ShareLaTeX [2] are pretty handy. I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, and we're excited to now be working together with the ShareLaTeX team [3]. Feedback always appreciated :)

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/

[2] https://www.sharelatex.com/

[3] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-i...

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Happy sharelatex user here. I'd say one of the essential advantages is rock solid simultaneous editing. I converted a couple of word users and they were instantly hooked. On a tight deadline, no less! Saved our ass in the end - the slowness of working serially in word would have meant missing the deadline.

I highly prefer LaTeX (and Markdown via pandoc) for writing, but Word does not require you to work serially. If you store a document on OneDrive (or SharePoint I guess), you can edit a document with multiple people simultaneously. Both from Word Online and Word on your PC/Mac.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word...

We've tried using it, as have other peopke I know. There are serious limitations to it. In practice I'd call it vapourware. Sharelatex delivers. In a SW dev team, markdown/latex+git also works great.

There's a huge difference between "use this specific cloud service" and "use anything that can diff text".

"use this specific cloud service" that most large companies and universities are adopting. And with a GUI that's much more familiar to non-programmers.

Multiple authors collaborating on documents seems to work pretty well on SharePoint Online and the latest version of Word - I did have some problems with this in the past but seems pretty solid now.

NB I do prefer working with something like git - but for collaborating with people who are never going to use git (even with a GUI) - particularly sales and marketing folks - it is very useful.

Neither does markdown. Just put it in a git repo.

This is not actual LaTeX document support. It's just the math portion of it, same as in, e.g., MathJax. So LaTeX packages will likely not ever be supported, this is only a convenience for people who'd like to write math as in LaTeX instead of UnicodeMath.

Apple did this and MS is following. Is there something going on with MathType? Has it fallen on the radar?

Microsoft seems to be particularly trying to push people to UnicodeMath [1][2] as a standard math exchange format. It sounds like from the blog post that (La)TeX math support is almost a "free" bonus given UnicodeMath is somewhat based on TeX prefix patterns (but as Unicode characters and joiners as much as possible) and the UnicodeMath standard supports a somewhat trivial conversion between the two.

[1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1.p...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2016/09/07/unicodem...

I think MathType still exists, but since it works by embedding an OLE object into the document there are limits in how well it integrates with other features of the platform. It's the equivalent of having to insert equations as images in LaTeX and editing them via a different application. Change your document font and the equations won't care, change font size or colour and the equations won't care, etc.

Microsoft Equation Editor (effectively, MathType demo version) was deprecated in Office 2007 and replaced by a new custom system, that has supported AutoCorrect for TeX (eg. \pi → π) for quite some time, and that looks much better than MathType ever did.

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