Online collaborative LaTeX editor | Hacker News Reader

Online collaborative LaTeX editor

writelatex.com

148 pointsfachoper69 comments

Founder of http://www.ShareLaTeX.com here, the guys at writelatex have done a great job of making a new clear home page since last time they were on HackerNews (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385300) the example presentation and no sign in required is a really great touch as it helps quickly bring down the bar for those new to LaTeX.

The online LaTeX editor is not an easy problem to solve, compiling massive projects (hundreds of megs) elastically with several different compilers is not something you can crack in a weekend hence why I merge with http://www.scribtex.com.

Good luck to writelatex!

Does scribtex do latex compilation as a service? (I emailed you guys about this at some point, and you said you had no plans to do this yourself, but how do ya'll work with scribtex?)

Yeah we do offer a LaTeX compile api (it's what powers scribtex and sharelatex). Drop us an email team at sharelatex.com and one of us will sort something out for you.

No sign-in is nice as an option, but the fact that you can't sign in is a negative for me - I'd like to be able to manage multiple documents and projects within an account like on ScribTeX.

Oh, and ShareLaTeX looks really good; thanks for sharing! I'm going to try it out now.

Hi StevenXC - thanks for the comments - we've now developed a sign in option which is planned as part of our next release - we were planning to push tomorrow, looking to see if we can do it now!

And as if by magic - you can now sign up to manage your docs on writelatex.com :-)

Slick, thanks.

We aim to please :-)

WriteLaTeX looks pretty cool. Have you looked at using the methods from Kile for better syntax highlighting? I noticed a problem on the (otherwise excellent) main page with the text boxes: http://imgur.com/SojY1, Chrome 23.0.1271.95, Linux, zoom 125% (though that doesn't seem to change it). Also, is Asymptote support planned? (The rotatable 3D figures probably aren't very feasible, but everything else should be.)

Thanks!

We are working on better syntax highlighting. I'll have a look at Kile's, now that you've mentioned it.

Thanks for reporting the issue with the text boxes.

I hadn't seen Asymptote before, but it looks very good, so I'll have to think about it. Thanks for the link! :) (Edit: note that we do support pgfplots, which also makes nice plots.)

"Password is too short (minimum is 8 characters)" - this can lose you users. I don't want to invent yet another password just to try this out. So offer feedback on password strength, but let users decide on the secutity/convenience tradeoff. Better yet, use openid.

Thanks for the feedback - that's a very good point, as it to use openid.

Thanks for the comments beck5 - good luck to you guys too - as you say, lots of challenges but we keep making progress.

both WriteLatex and ScribTex use codemirror, and ShareLatex uses ace, which editor do you plan to use after merging?

Would be really nice if there was intellisense! Great project though!

ShareLaTeX superfan here - glad to see you taking the new competition in stride! :)

Competition in a space is good for both of you - I can't imagine that many people will use offline LaTeX editors in the near future because of you guys.

The is also http://www.scribtex.com/ (unfortunately, going down, but was nice, also supporting Git access), https://www.sharelatex.com/.

And for short LaTeX text, there is http://mathb.in/.

Also, http://www.scigit.com/ looks promising (not working yet, though).

Don't worry we are working hard to get all the functionality of ScribTeX fully incorporated into ShareLaTeX (git push & pull). We also have no long term plans on turning off scribtex while people still use it, but the focus is sharelatex.

It's how I understood things. However, without possibility to invite collaborators (to ScribTeX), there is not much use for me. That said, I used it, liked it a lot, started paying for it... just to discover that I cannot use it (in terms of, well, collaboration) anymore (so I quit paying, but with a bitter "you should have warned me when I wanted to pay, not only in the Sign Up form").

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see git stuff at ShareLaTeX.

Or writeLaTeX.

Sorry I don't fully understand, you can invite collaborators on sharelatex into the project via the project settings area. Free accounts are capped to having 1 collaborator (1 person + yourself). Please drop me an email henry.oswald at sharelatex.com

The comment was about ScribTeX, where I cannot invite others (unless they already have accounts) but still I can (or at least - could recently) upgrade to paying plan (without any warning that ScribTeX is no longer accepting new users).

ShareLaTeX - sure, I know and understand.

ScribTeX is going down? What happened?

It's not going down, we've just started pointing new users at ShareLaTeX, since that's where our development efforts are focused. If you have an account with ScribTeX you'll still be able to use if for the foreseeable future.

Ah, thanks. If that's where the development going, would you recommend moving existing projects there? I could do it by hand, but is there a way to use Git or some other automated process to transfer projects?

We don't have an automated way yet but there will be one eventually, most users are doing it add hock as you can import zip files easily. It is up to you which tool you want to use, sharelatex still lacks the git push and pull which may be a deal breaker for you but it is the future.

Founder here...

Great to see this on HN! Feedback much appreciated. Happy to answer questions...

Have you considered the popular front-end languages like Markdown, org-mode or any of the plethora of formats that have translators to LaTeX?

Hi Beltiras,

Thanks for the question - we've focused initially on creating a low-barrier-to-entry front-end for LaTeX, but which still worked in the native language. Which way we go in future will depend on the feedback we get on writelatex!

This would be really easy to implement using pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/), which converts Markdown with extensions and LaTeX formulas into LaTeX. I think it supports Org-mode too.

Markdown would be excellent for sharing short notes and ideas among mathematicians, as opposed to full-blown papers.

Also, great job! I like how simple and efficient the interface is.

Thanks! This is a great idea --- we'll see what we can do.

Looks neat! Is there possibility to add vim key binding, including search with '/'?

Also Git versioning would be awesome!

Yes, this is certainly planned.

Thanks! :wq

I can maybe see myself using this to tweak the last stages of a paper with a coauthor, but otherwise I can't imagine writing LaTeX without emacs keybindings (auctex, reftex, cdlatex, I'm leaving them all lowercase because I can't remember their idiosyncratic capitalization patterns). Case in point: in trying out your editor, I opened several new browser windows accidentally.

So, is there a way to upload latex and bibtex files?

My documents are full of :w, ct. and kkkjjkk --- we are working on adding keybindings. :)

Yes, you can upload .tex and .bib files using the file menu.

Thanks for the feedback!

Another thought (as I edit a document that a co-author wrote): if you could mimic tcilatex.tex (which Scientific Workplace throws into any document it touches) in a minimal, nonintrusive way, that would be fantastic. (tcilatex seems to be changing the 'gather' environment so that individual equations can no longer be numbered, for example.)

OK, we'll have a look. For now, you can upload tcilatex.tex to writeLaTeX and then \input{tcilatex.tex} after your \documentclass line. (Note: it seems to conflict with the amsmath package, however.)

Thanks!

Wow, it even works with tikz! If it becomes popular, I bet you'll need some CPUs.

tikz is a great package! Re the CPUs - we're working on some neat ways to get round this :-)

Can you give us any insight into how you plan on getting around this? It seems that publication quality typesetting and layout requires a certain level of CPU power, especially with complex graphics from TikZ/PGF and/or pstricks. Do you think your solutions will also help desktop users reduce the amount of CPU latex eats?

Good question. There's not much we can do at the LaTeX level, but writeLaTeX also has to send images of the pages back to browser, and we can improve that part of the process in quite a few ways.

Perhaps it would help to checkpoint the compilation periodically, keyed by hash of input consumed so far, so when adding a word on page 100 you don't have to load all packages and recompile 100 pages.

- One approach is fork() processes (the tricky part being flushing all I/O and redirecting to separate files). This only works in RAM, which means active users & machine affinity, but I suspect storing checkpoints for long is useless anyway.

- Another approach is TeX's builtin memory \dump mechanism. This generates a file, so you could reuse flexibly, stuff in memcached etc. And easier to set up. But looking at mylatex.ltx I get the impression you can't \dump from a process that loaded a dump, so you'd have to start from initial tex and re-parse all of latex :-(. Perhaps still a gain, at least keeping one dump after the preamble?

The other half of the problem is getting the page(s) you want quickly without waiting for the whole document to compile. My impression is pdflatex output is not valid PDF until it's done. Less of a problem for writelatex which already does separate images?

Thanks for the suggestions! The fork() idea is very interesting --- I hadn't thought of that. Drop me a line at john at writelatex.com if you ever want to chat about tex stuff. :)

It's awesome. I love it!

One feature that would make it much much awesome would be an integration with Github. In our university we're trying to convince professors to release the latex source of the lecture notes on Github in order to receive issues or pull requests from students for typos or improvements. As most teachers don't know git it would be great if they could open files on writelatex from github and commit changes. I know that's quite hard to do but imho it could really improve the project.

p.s.: Is it open source? Will it ever be?

That's a great idea! Integration with github is on our TODO list, so hopefully we can help with that.

It's not open source, but we're looking at several ways of taking it forward, and that's one of them.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

Is it possible to include class files such as ieee.cls? http://mocha-java.uccs.edu/ieee/

Yep, you can upload .cls files using the files menu.

This seems to work well -- I imagine I would use it if I were using a temporary computer, an ipad, or some such thing. What would be nice is if I could integrate it with dropbox or similar services, essentially use it to edit and compile files in my dropbox library. Also it would be good to use a standard editor with config files that could be saved to customize the environment.

Thanks for the comments - glad you liked it! We're working on the offline integration and user customisation features, they're in the pipeline.

Co-founder of http://www.SpanDeX.io here, it's cool to see so much excitement around web-based LaTeX editing. As Henry mentioned, scaling sites like this is quite challenging as LaTeX wasn't really built for performance or scaling, but it's still more pleasant than running on your own machine ;) Best of luck to everyone!

Real-time rendering is done pretty fast and nicely by whizzytex (sudo apt-get install whizzytex), if you don't need the collaborative features and are comfortable with emacs.

This being said, doing it in a web client sounds like no small technical achievement!

Thanks - whizzytex is a good package for real-time rendering. What we're trying to do with writelatex.com is help users get into LaTeX by removing some of the traditional barriers (needing to install, compile, etc), plus making it easy for existing users to work on the go and from any comp.

Hope you like the site! :-)

This is awesome! Great work. One must have for me is auto complete, I use LaTeXila and its hard to move away from auto complete. Spell checking would also be amazing, I have yet to find a good LaTeX IDE with spell check.

Thanks sonier :-) auto-complete is on our development list, I agree it makes things easier once you're used to it!

I have been using Emacs for quite a while now. It offers (via AucTeX/RefTeX) a brilliant solution for bibtex files, references, writing LaTeX, autocompletion etc. And if you use it in conjunction with either ispell or flyspell (on-the-fly spell-checking), you basically can use both at the same time.[1] However, this might be daunting, especially when this means starting and dealing with Emacs for the first time.

[1]: It might however be necessary to redefine one of the shortcuts for either flyspell or autocompletion, since they both use the same keys by default.

I've always been a vim guy myself. I guess it might be time to learn Emacs and give this a try.

I write latex in vim using latex-suite and I'm very happy with it. The vim spell checker also works well in latex files.

I do the same. However, I also view the generated PDFs in Emacs and I set it up so that the PDF-in-Emacs will auto-reload whenever the PDF changes. And I agree, refTeX is amazing and awesome!

Lately, I even left pure LaTeX and migrated to org-mode and its LaTeX/PDF-export. That is a pretty brilliant combination, I must say.

Really among the many things Emacs does, LaTeX is one thing it does exceedingly well.

Thanks to all for the feedback - massive spike in traffic, and over 100 users signed up in the couple of hours since we pushed the site update :-)

More to come soon, and you can follow us @writelatex for the latest.

This is awesome! I'd also like to share one of my local Wisconsin startups tackling the same problem: http://spandex.io/

The images in the right pane are blurry for me -- I guess they're getting stretched out on my monitor. Could you use vector graphics instead of JPGs?

Yes, that's on our TODO list. Thanks for the feedback!

Even works on my iPad. Color me extremely impressed!

Founder here... Just pushed an update so you an sign up and manage your docs. Enjoy!

This is not the relaxing weekend I had planned! But yes, user accounts now available, plus a short getting started guide to help new users. As ever, all feedback appreciated

Seems very slow.

We're bringing up some more capacity now...

Hi glomph - the other writeLaTeX founder here - we were preparing for an update this weekend, weren't anticipating being posted on HN again! Should be running faster shortly.

How well does this work from a Chromebook?

I'm afraid we don't have a Chromebook to test on. We do test on Chrome and Linux, though, so hopefully it works well.

Thanks!

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