FlyLatex: a free, open-source real-time collaborative latex editor | Hacker News Reader

FlyLatex: a free, open-source real-time collaborative latex editor

github.com

61 pointsalabid25 comments

I'm curious how you handle the LaTeX compilation, since in my experience this is one of the trickiest things to get set up securely. I created the "Common LaTeX Service Interface (CLSI)" (https://github.com/scribtex/clsi) as an open standard and open source HTTP API to provide access to a LaTeX compiler. I think it's one of these problems that people will keep solving again and again unless we work together to get it right. The CLSI currently powers ShareLaTeX, ScribTeX, and LaTeXLab (with a different implementation of a similar standard), so it's been well battle tested. If you'd be interested in integrating the CLSI with FlyLaTeX, I'd be more than happy to help out. Contact details are in my profile.

I just pipe the input to "pdflatex" asynchronously (nodejs style). I'd check out CLSI. Thanks for sharing.

I am actually very flattered that they say its a clone of my site (http://sharelatex.com) at the top of the read me, thanks! I think there are now about 107 different online LaTeX editors.

No offence (but pun intended), yours was 103rd or 105th? :-)

I'm glad there is an OSS version of it now. That said, ShareLatex was the first time I checked an online LaTeX editor and thought "wow, that's pretty damn good and comfortable to work with".

I saw this link and I immediately thought of ShareLatex. I love that site and I use it for all my graduate work. So much easier than working with LaTeX on my own machine. You guys rock and it is by far the best LaTeX editor I've see online.

Personally I think it's time to retire LaTeX. There's been a few solutions based on MathML and Markdown, which offer the power of LaTeX formulas without the convoluted language. A notable example is notepag.es (https://github.com/fivesixty/notepages).

It seems to me projects like that are great for quickly writing some math formulas, do some non-formal papers for school and so on. But I can't see how replacing LaTeX is even in the intended scope of the project nor how it can come close to it.

I think it's good enough for writing a journal paper. The journals would probably need to stay with LaTeX for the powerful typesetting and layout features, but converting from this MathML-Markdown mix to LaTeX should be trivial for them.

Very much this, I never quite harnessed the power of \LaTeX\ despite using specialised editors such as LyX. Although I'd recommend AsciiDoc over Markdown because it's easy to convert to (e)book, whereas publishing Markdown is done by converting it to \LaTeX\ first. (AsciiDoc merely uses it "under the bonnet" for PDF conversion.)

pandoc mybook.md -o mybook.epub

If that produces a reasonable result, I stand corrected.

I've not seen a non-TeX layout engine that produces remotely acceptable results for setting mathematical material, for instance for line-breaking equations. I'm sure it is possible but I don't believe it exists at the moment.

I disagree that it is time to retire LaTeX, since it is not just about formulas.

In the humanities, linguists are very fond of it for the use of diacritics and tables etc, while the humanities overall greatly profit from bib(la)tex. Furthermore, the KOMA-Script document classes give excellent calculated full-text page layouts without having to play with geometry. Additionally, hyphenation usually just works, microtypography is an awesome add-on etc.

I have yet to see something providing results that look as professional while at the same time allowing to be used with arbitrary writing programs (text editors!), being free & free and being as well documented.

Is there an option to generate PNGs or JPGs from a formula (without having to go through pdflatex)?

You can also use dvipng, but that requires going through dvi; pdflatex and a PDF-to-image converter works far better. I don't know of any TeX engines designed to render images directly.

If only pdflatex could be faster...

Dev of http://spandex.io here. Good to have more people in the space :)

Of all the online LaTeX editors, yours has the best name :)

Very nice!

It would be really cool to hook-up some git functionality.

Seems like a nice idea. I'd consider that in the future.

Is this bound to latex or is there something like formatting plugins? Can the latex formatting be easily exchanged to handle markdown or a wiki style markup or anythig else?

A realtime frontend with a modular pandoc + git backend could finally solve many online editing pains.

Maybe you should check us out: www.authorea.com

We're pseudo-realtime by design, so you only will see collaborators' edits once they are saved. You will see which section or paragraph they are working on, but they have exclusive editing-rights to that element. There is already a git backend and markdown editing option.

We're working on git push/pull access, that should be coming very soon. Currently you can see/undo commits via what we call the newsfeed.

I understanding that it uses the command-line TeX compiler. If there is a way to hook it to https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js/ that'd be very interesting.

I'd look into texlive.js. Thanks for sharing.

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