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Comment by xaa | Hacker News Reader

Something like this is sorely needed. Google Docs is the best compromise between simplicity and collaboration that my group has come up with, but of course it doesn't have reference support.

It is very visually appealing and has good features. However, for me, it seems very sluggish and unresponsive.

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This is really neat, a good combination of Markdown & LaTeX.

As one of the founders of https://www.writelatex.com, one of the interesting differences is the fact you're editing the "output" file rather than the source - takes a bit of getting used to! Looking forward to seeing it develop :-)

Thanks John. Authorea founder here. First off, I have tried writelatex for the first time just a couple of weeks ago and it really works great to create beautiful documents. Great work.

Yes, we (and most scholars in general) are very used to editing a source (Latex mostly) and compiling it to something else (a PDF output, or similar). We are trying to streamline that process using the web as the canvas, and render directly to HTML5. In a way you are right, it feels like you are editing directly the HTML output. Which is fine! Our hope is that researchers, especially the ones who already work and write on the web will quickly get used to such a workflow.

The speed definitely needs to be worked on. We were planning on a "Show HN" post once we had modified the architecture a bit. It's all on a single server right now.

Sorry about the sluggishness.

Sorry if I exposed you guys prematurely. I stumbled upon it and thought it was a fantastic idea that solves a lot of fundamental issues with collaborating on papers. I've been using Mercurial and bitbucket for this purpose for a while, but it's definitely an issue trying to get collaborators to work this way (if I can even get some of them to clear the LaTex hurdle first). I really hope this becomes a viable option soon.

No apologies needed. The timing is pretty good, we were going to do it in two weeks or so. We've been working on this for about a year now and for the first 8 or 9 months I was telling people that it was usable but not useful. I think it crossed the barrier into useful a few months ago.

I don't know if you've noticed, but we also give the option to write in Markdown. Citations work too, as long as you put them in Latex style, ie \cite{synparb}. Markdown is nearly powerful enough to write a full-featured article, and Latex is clearly overpowered. I like the idea of extending Markdown to give it everything one would need to write an article, without all of the excess.

I hope you try this out on your collaborators.

I've played around with Markdown a bit, especially in writing computatable documents using the IPython notebook. I've actually been hoping to use either Markdown or reST along with pandoc to write a future paper, but I need to do more testing to make sure the conversion is as robust as advertised. But hopefully if Authorea solves the collaboration issue, then I'll have a viable alternative to that approach.

Markdown + pandoc is viable for writing now. I'm doing my thesis with it. Although the citation support gave me the shits so I wrote my own citation markup extension (incomplete - https://github.com/singingfish/Citeproc-Markdown ).

IPython looks amazing. I haven't personally used it yet but it appears to bring most of the Mathematica-notebook goodness over to the python community. The one thing it is lacking, which is admittedly pretty hard to implement, is Mathematica style equation entry. I can input an equation in Mathematica much faster than I can in Matlab or python.

Markdown is a real pleasure to use. One of my favorite features is that it is easy on the eyes. I was never in love with the Latex syntax.

This is excellent. I am writing my phd dissertation right now, and wrote my own variant of markdown to generate it! I wholeheartedly agree! You guys have the right design spirit and vision. Take it forward, and grow a little bolder! Make versions that uniquely take advantage of the web for READING, not just for WRITING!

Yep, we are exactly on the same wavelength! We have big plans :)

What do you compile your markdown flavour to? Is it public?

At the moment it is mostly GitHub-flavored markdown. We did consider Pandoc-flavor, but for the time being we are sticking to GitHub's. We might change it slightly. So far, 80% of our users have authored in LaTeX so we have been busy supporting that

And does your university accept the thesis in the format you output to? The requirements here are quite specific, even LaTeX is nontrivial to set up to fulfill them.

hey- Alberto here (Authorea co-founder). Glad to see us on the frontpage of HN, but as Nate said, we weren't really ready for it. I was cooking dinner! Sorry if we're still a bit sluggish.

We're also trying to make the easy things easy, whether in Latex or Markdown. Drag-and-drop figures is one example. Support for citations directly from ADS is another.

Out of curiosity, can I ask what field you are in?

Computational biophysics - When it's just our lab working on a paper, we tend to use LaTex, but the real headache is when collaborating with experimentalists. They seem deeply invested in Word/Endnote, and it's quite difficult to get them to consider using any other tools (even thought they often hate what they are using).

I've never known anyone in the biological sciences to use LaTex. Everyone here tends to use Word/Endnote because that's what they've always used (and its what the PIs can use). But you're right that nobody likes it. I think tht LaTex is just too complicated for people to get their heads around. Anything that isn't WYSIWYG just isn't too going to fly for the vast majority of biologists. Writing in LaTex is just too much like programming for them. (For good reason - it is programming)

For my last paper though, I was able to do it all with Google Docs, except the citations. I ended up just embedding citations like {author, 2013} and using either Papers or endnote to do the insertion.

However, I still had to submit the article in word format, so I really didn't gain anything and had to effectively reformat it 3 times. I think this has as much to do with Word/Endnote's de facto monopoly as anything. Since the journals require it, we work with it.

All of that said - I'd love to see something like this take off, but there would have to be some buy-in from the publishers.

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