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Comment by mallyvai | Hacker News Reader

From @kmatzen's comments on Authorea.com: " What do you get when you combine authors with gonorrhea? Authorea!

I like it! There are two things I would still like though. One would be page rendering in the browser. We often have to iterate several times on a paper adjusting figures, text, padding, etc. to get everything to fit within the page limit. I could write the paper in this and then export it to tex, but that defeats the purpose. The second thing is support of popular LaTeX packages. It looks like I can upload arbitrary tex documents, but that's going to get messy if I have to upload the same packages for every paper I'm writing.

We use github for our papers right now. Less than ideal. "

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What can I say? Naming is hard. We initially thought to ourselves, "Spreading science should be fun and intuitive, like an STD. And it should be hard to get rid of." Thus Authorea was born.

Have you tried our pdf exporter to check page length? We are trying to build it out to where you, as a user, don't have to worry about packages. If there is a journal you would like to submit to and we don't currently have the journal setup as an export template, please contact us and we will be happy to add it.

It's funny how authors worry so much about page length and figure placement, and then the first thing a journal does is remove all of the formatting the author has put in place.

hi @kmatzen/@mallyvai! Adding briefly to Nate's comment (my co-founder at Authorea), I would like to point out that we do support many popular LaTeX packages. One big reason why we do not support custom LaTeX packages is that some of them are really intended for the printed page and cannot be easily ported to the web- and the point of Authorea is to create web-native documents, which render in the browser, first, and can then be ported to print formats. In other words, we support a safe subset of LaTeX which we can easily convert back and forth into other web formats (such as Markdown). Do let us know if you have a LaTeX package in mind and we will see if we can add it for you.

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