Write LaTeX - browser-based collaborative editor | Hacker News Reader

Write LaTeX - browser-based collaborative editor

writelatex.com

92 pointsnkoren43 comments

Creator of http://www.sharelatex.com here. LaTeX collaboration and environment setup is a big problem, online collaborative environments are going to become more popular. The more of them out there the better so good luck to jdleesmiller and writeLaTeX.

writeLaTeX has a nice split view which I have not implemented yet. The rate of update from collaborators seems to be relatively slow (compared to sharelatex). I would be interested in knowing the architecture behind the scenes.

Thanks for the feedback! Sharelatex is also really cool.

I'll hopefully write a blog post about the infrastructure one day, but it's actually pretty standard: a rails app on Heroku + some render machines. I'm pleased to see that it has (so far) scaled as intended!

After using LaTeX for the past ~8 years one thing I have noticed is that instant preview is not adapted at all: LaTeX compilation is simply too slow. I prefer compiling when I want to see how things turn out after making a bunch of changes rather than having the compiler throw out a bunch of errors — and breaking my workflow — just because for some reason it decided it should recompile while I was in the middle of writing a macro.

Another minor quibble I have with these kind of services is that they often only support [pdf]latex, I'd like to be able to use [xe|lua]tex (after having a taste of fontspec/unimath I simply can't go back).

Other than that, great project!

I'm not sure instant preview is a compelling feature. The whole point of LaTeX is to put content before layout.

And how is instant preview hindering your ability to put content first?

It doesn't necessarily, but I find myself spending too much time tweaking visual appearance and layout if I compile too often. I prefer (if I can manage the self-control) to write up a semantically oriented LaTeX document and then only do a round of layout-tweaking (e.g. babying the figure-placement algorithm) at the end.

I really wish there were Latex editors that would preview just the equation you're currently editing. I know macros make that tricky, but it would be a killer feature for anyone getting started with Latex.

preview-latex (bundled with AUCTeX these days) comes pretty close to this.

I believe that AUCTeX [1] does essentially this in EMACS. It embeds a preview of each equation into the buffer, but I don't know whether it's smart enough to handle macros.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AUCTeX

Creator of writeLaTeX here...

I find the auto-preview useful when I'm making tables or figures. It also enables some cool stuff, like this 'workbook'-like document that I recently did with a friend: http://writelatex.com/4134bzfwng

There should be probably be a way to turn off the preview, though.

I'm using LyX for all my LaTeX editing now. The editing and instant preview for math are wonderful.

I'd love to see a live-collaborative LyX... I'd like to see a live-collaborative everything, but most open-source codebases make so many assumptions about a single editor per buffer/document, or a single cursor per buffer/document, that adding collaborative functionality is a gargantuan and very application-specific task. I don't think it's even possible to find a general strategy for making the necessary modifications, but if someone were to figure out how, they'd be the most in-demand consultant in tech, that's for sure.

The 'compile in the middle of my macro' problem is a tricky one. writeLaTeX won't interrupt you with errors while you keep typing, but that's the best I've managed so far.

Support for other backends is definitely planned.

Thanks for the feedback!

The preview is nice, but I have more faith in http://sharelatex.com/ reaching a complete and usable product.

Creator of writeLaTeX here...

Thanks for the feedback. Can I ask what kinds of features / changes you (or others!) would like to see in the complete product?

Dropbox integration!

I have an adviser that hates TeX and would prefer to provide comments but no edits. I would love to see an environment where I could both collaborate with other students on writing the TeX, but also have the ability to enable peer review with Crocodoc-style [1] commenting and annotation.

[1] https://crocodoc.com/

I'd love to have replayable version history (with comments on versions like mateja suggested). If it could integrate with github as a storage backend, it would be awesome :)

Seems like a perfect use for filepicker.io

It's self-promoting, but actually it'd be really nice to be able to open files from dropbox/github and save the pdf's when their done. Then I could actually get work done on my chromebook

I am currently writing my master thesis in the almighty LaTeX, and when is was looking for an editor I also considered these online alternatives like this one.

The most important feature I came across is multiple files usage. My current editor (TexStudio) has a neat feature where I use my 'main' document as some sort of a container. I put the document header (with the packages and everything) in there and for every chapter I use a different file. This lets me work on a chapter in a seperate file which does not get me lost in a 1 huge file when looking up stuff in the content.

It also shows a tree of your document structure per chapter/section/subsection/subsubsection so you can navigate easily through the document. This might be a useful feature for this online alternative.

Also, compiling from one of the chapter files actually compiles the entire document, which is nice (because otherwise it'll complain that is has no document structure, packages, etc).

Creator here...

Great feedback! I mostly use writeLaTeX for smaller projects (papers, talks, short notes), so I haven't done much on multiple file support. Some of the other online editors (e.g. scribtex and sharelatex) have better support for multiple files, I think.

Ok, did not know that :)

Well, maybe multiple files are not all that necessary, but a tree showing the document structure and enabling you to jump to a certain section with one click in the tree would be nice :)

Good luck on the project.

If you don't know about it already, you might find SyncTeX useful--it's a feature of a lot of TeX editors.

Love this app! I find myself writing a lot of LaTeX documents lately, and can see a lot of potential. I would love to see things like templates, user accounts, and/or even integration with Google Docs! Being able to upload and download stuff to my Google Drive would be killer...

Very good! Configuring a LaTex environment in a new computer was a pain for me. This took that pain away.

But I still can't type in Portuguese, with 'áàãç' (without escaping and coding everything). That would be a killer feature for me.

I think it may help if you include this package: \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} Does that work?

Thanks for the feedback!

I like it, kudos! While I don't see myself ever leaving Vim, I think WriteLaTeX (or something similar) could easily become the standard way for introducing beginners to LaTeX.

The only missing features I can think of are: snippets for environments (tables, figures, beamer frames, etc.), base templates (report, book, beamer presentation, letter, CV) and maybe interactive wizards for more complicated stuff (for example, a grid-like input for the tabular environment).

Creator here...

Thanks -- very good suggestions! I also miss vim when I'm in writeLaTeX, but there is a vim mode for the CodeMirror editor component, which I've been meaning to try out.

The "Preview" is a killer feature. You need to make it more responsive though - currently (probably due to server load) there's a lot of lag. However, if you want to develop this into a full fledged project it should "just work" without waiting for some time for the preview to load. This includes the errors which you load in the Tex editor too. Both the instant error and preview features are great but you've somehow got to make it scale.

Creator here...

Thanks! The current load on the servers is a factor in the current delays. I've also made some progress on reducing the render times, but unfortunately that did not come soon enough for the current traffic spike. Watch this space...

I've done quite a bit of work getting a scalable cloud LaTeX compiler set up (http://clsi.scribtex.com). Send me an email at james@scribtex.com if you'd like to chat about some of the issues that you might be facing. LaTeX is surprisingly good at running quickly and efficiently once you tweak it a bit!

This is a huge stretch, but will there be any support for noweb?

Whenever I use LaTeX, it's usually for math/physics/stat homework where either computation or graphs are involved. It would be lovely if I could somehow inject (for example)

    <<echo=FALSE,fig=TRUE>>=
    x <- -5:5
    y <- (x - 2)^2 - 5

    plot(x, y)
    @

into the page and have a graph show up.

Creator here...

That would be really cool -- I use Sweave and R a lot, and I often wish I could do this in writeLaTeX, but I haven't made much progress on it. The server side would be pretty complicated.

For simple plots, it's amazing what you can do in LaTeX with pgfplots and similar -- e.g. http://writelatex.com/4134bzfwng

Thanks for the comment!

while this is awesome, I can't imagine anyone in my research group trusting a not submitted paper to a site like this. For on-site usage I hacked together a similar site in minutes when etherpad-lite came out ( you can try it out at http://brutus.lostpackets.de/ethertex/ethertex.py ) , but sadly I lack the time to make it really usable.

Creator here...

Thanks for the feedback and the cool demo. writeLaTeX is also something I hacked together for my own use, but I have been adding to it gradually over the last year.

That's a fair point about trust. I guess I could package it up as a VM for people to run on their own servers, if there was enough demand, but I think centralised hosting has many benefits, especially for collaborative work.

As someone who used to write a lot of LaTeX documents, this just isn't up to snuff yet. It's slow (which they can fix) but what would make it really helpful is hints in LaTeX commands and support for packages. I haven't tried any complex documents yet, hopefully a full 200 page doc with biblo and index would render correctly as well. It's cool though, I hope it does end up working well.

Creator here...

Thanks for your comments!

There is a full TeXLive distribution on the back end, so all of the packages are there (including beamer, tikz, bibliography, etc.). The editor is CodeMirror, so the underlying infrastructure for auto-complete is there; I just haven't had a chance to try it out. I mostly use writeLaTeX for short documents (papers, talks, etc.), so I've never tried it with a 200-page document -- current page limit for the auto-preview is 30, but that's a bit arbitrary.

Hi, I'm the author of writeLaTeX.

Sorry if you get slow previews -- I am bringing some extra capacity online now...

Very nice! I particularly liked the low-overhead sharing via unique URLs. No accounts, no signup.

I also thought the delay in the preview (whether intended or not) was a nice touch, preventing syntax errors being issued while typing is in progress.

I can see myself using this regularly.

Cool, I just found out it works for beamer, too. Having instant preview for presentations is great, as I often find myself moving figures around all the time.

Great work!

Cool. Don't know what's the end game for the project, but it would be awesome if this was open source and I could install it on my own server.

Preview doesn't work for me on latest stable Chrome and Win 7.

Sorry about that -- it was probably due to server load. I have brought more capacity on line, and previews should be working better now.

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