NoTex: An online text editor for reStructuredText, Markdown, LaTex | Hacker News Reader

NoTex: An online text editor for reStructuredText, Markdown, LaTex

notex.ch

93 pointsrhythmvs20 comments

Help.. two years of work, and suddenly this amount of attention: I'd planned to have a relaxed Sunday in sunny Antalya/TR, but my server is now swamped with requests; let's see how long it will last. :) -- · Hasan Karahan · Software Engineer · · hasan.karahan@blackhan.com · · http://www.blackhan.com · · MSc ETH Zurich ·

I have down voted you by reflex because your message looks like spam (mail address, link etc ...).

You should read the comment part of the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), it will avoid you many down votes.

Sorry, Rexxar. Now that I read back over the comment I have written, I can understand why you may think it is spam. Actually, I am the creator of NoTex, and I was just trying to give everyone my contact information. I thought since the discussion is about my product, some folks might want to talk directly about it with me.

Maybe a more accurate name would be Sphinx Online.

http://sphinx-doc.org/

NoTex is a misleading name: if you want to use it and have math in your document, you must use TeX (or LaTeX).

I do use Sphinx in the backend, which I love as a tool! I've created NoTex.ch because I love the PDF quality of LaTex. But both these tools are a little difficult for non-computer-science people to use. I wanted to give non-tech people access to the publication quality of these tools without requiring (in-depth) knowledge of how to use them. And hence the name "No Tex". :)

Could you please elaborate? How does NoTex compare to other TeX web tools like http://fiduswriter.org/ or even http://arachnoid.com/latex

Your front page doesn't do a good job of describing its features. Also curious how you put it together from Sphinx?

For the elaboration just go read https://notex.ch/overview/ -- the other two tools I've never heard of so I can't really compare. The front page description is indeed minimal, which is something I might improve in future: But since it is open source, you're more than welcome to send me a corresponding pull request. ;-) For now read the forum, blog and play around yourself to figure out its features.

W.r.t. Sphinx: Conceptually it's really nothing that fancy, just some Python glue code that takes the data structures out of my web application's data structures, and puts it together such that Sphinx can understand it: The only interesting part might be that there is an internal front- and backend separation [based on ZeroMQ] which helps me to create workers which do the actual conversion.

Yeah, I wished that the rST .. math:: directive would use ascii math.

NoTex.ch enables to write books, reports, articles and theses using the reStructuredText markup language and convert them to LaTex.

I have been looking for something like this - I desperately want to hook readthedocs internally as a documentation server and still have it editable by non - emacs using non techies.

I think it's much more powerful than a wiki (for docs) but the missing component is rst editing

Edit: totally agree on the vast majority of unsung OSS workers and hero(ine)s

If anyone has actually cracked the editable by non - emacs using non techies nut I would love to hear about it. In every attempt I've seen, non-tech people who are used to using Word simply don't get markup of any kind, or if they do, do not think it is in any way easier or more manageable. "Why can't we just use Word?" is the response I've always gotten.

I'm one of the maintainers of readthedocs and would love to integrate something like this. We have somewhat integrated support for linking to GitHub as an editor, but that is only a half-baked solution.

Hi forsaken, I've actually thought a while ago about a similar integration, but had simply not the time to go for the idea; I'd be more than open to discuss a possible integration if you think NoTex.ch might be a viable option. Regards, Hasan -- Email: hasan.karahan@blackhan.com

My thoughts (random as they are)

- Contenteditable is going to change everything. The range of editors like Aloha knock spots off most CMSes and they are in browser WYSIWYG

- People can learn to use markups (cf Wikipedia). But encouraging them to leap from Wysiwig to markup is something best broken in gently.

- there must be a subset of a markdown that is simple enough to be reliably translated round trip from ReST to HTML5 - the obvious ones are headers, paragraphs and bullets. Which to be frank probably covers 80% of all formatting the world over.

- so an HTML editor that allows both markdown editing directly and a tiny subset of HTML that emits direct as markdown. This is afaik simple to do(?!)

- A editor / REST receiver that captures incoming pages and writes back to git repo (I wrote one for Connexions it's on GitHub, the one you reference sounds similar, there are probably dozens)

So in my head it seems doable - the use case a?

- I think some documentation should often be written before the code - it's part of the requirements capture?

- It's frequently useful to have actual users write / improve the user manuals and other docs - and this way they don't have to learn rest immediately.

lifeisstillgood and forsaken - wondering if there's a possibility to connect readthedocs with Penflip? Penflip is a project I'm working on that hosts writing projects backed by git repos, with an in-browser markdown writing interface. It's like a stripped down GitHub for non-techies (and for writing instead of coding).

I'm currently not integrating with any external services, but recently have been thinking about it.

Maybe something here. Let's chat? Email + twitter in profile.

Wow! this is pretty amazingly well done.

Yeah, just stumbled upon it the other day. Impressive indeed. Markdown, reST, LaTeX, project-based file management, Git integration… One author, >2000 commits in under a year, actively maintained. Some devs are just these brave silent workers…

Plus, open source: https://github.com/hsk81/notex

Amazing what a single person can accomplish with the right focus.

This is really nice. My note-taking+journal+reference management system recently converged on a vim+nerdtree+mardkwon+git+ssh+pandoc setup. I think NoTex does all that in one suite. I like it!

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