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Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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