JohnHammersley

Religious symbol or two hands holding a pea? Or if you stretch the imagination really hard, a top down view of a TIE/IN ? :-)

https://identicons.github.com/JohnHammersley.png

Really good follow up to the referenced article posted here the other day -- I kind of wish we more often saw follow up articles like this (maybe we do and I just miss them)

Although, having posted this, I'm not sure why an editable version is all that useful...

The port to Javascript is really neat, I remember when that was on HN a month or so ago

No problem :-) I loved this example when I first saw it, and someone shared it with me again today so I decided to post it here.

Just bought a copy - I remember reading through the slides and thought there was a lot of good stuff there.

Whilst $79 may seem a lot for a pdf and a spreadsheet, it's really very little to pay for good advice! There really is no way to learn other than to do it and make your own mistakes on the way, but having something like this to hand should help you recover quicker, and if you avoid a few pitfalls because of it, all the better :-)

Just to add my twopenneth from running https://www.writelatex.com - allowing users create documents and start trying out the editor without signing up has been a big plus for us in terms of users, and is generally popular according to feedback.

And in the early stages, more exposure through more users is a good thing, helps spread the word.

For us it was the way we'd started out though, so easy to implement :-)

Have you seen the online LaTeX editors such as https://www.writelatex.com?

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 :-)

These look really nice - just opened up a resume and letter in https://www.writelatex.com for easy editing:

Resume: https://www.writelatex.com/74800gddxjr

Letter: https://www.writelatex.com/74798msdbzp

A site dedicated to "How can I explain the meaning of XYZ to my grandma?" would make a great wiki!

Re LaTeX: The new crop of online LaTeX editors are making it easier to use, taking away the installation/setup barriers amongst other things. I helped to develop https://www.writelatex.com to try to find a way to bring the language online to an Etherpad-like frontend.

I still never had this good an answer for what LaTeX is though - wish I'd thought to ask...

This looks great, and on first glance has a lot of useful tips. I'm pretty sure I'll discover a lot of things I'm doing inefficiently, and hopefully this will help me put them right.

Thanks for taking the time to put it together!

Thanks for the feedback - that's a very good point, as it to use openid.

Thanks to all for the feedback - massive spike in traffic, and over 100 users signed up in the couple of hours since we pushed the site update :-)

More to come soon, and you can follow us @writelatex for the latest.

Thanks - whizzytex is a good package for real-time rendering. What we're trying to do with writelatex.com is help users get into LaTeX by removing some of the traditional barriers (needing to install, compile, etc), plus making it easy for existing users to work on the go and from any comp.

Hope you like the site! :-)

Thanks for the comments - glad you liked it! We're working on the offline integration and user customisation features, they're in the pipeline.

We aim to please :-)

This is not the relaxing weekend I had planned! But yes, user accounts now available, plus a short getting started guide to help new users. As ever, all feedback appreciated

And as if by magic - you can now sign up to manage your docs on writelatex.com :-)

Hi Beltiras,

Thanks for the question - we've focused initially on creating a low-barrier-to-entry front-end for LaTeX, but which still worked in the native language. Which way we go in future will depend on the feedback we get on writelatex!

Thanks sonier :-) auto-complete is on our development list, I agree it makes things easier once you're used to it!

tikz is a great package! Re the CPUs - we're working on some neat ways to get round this :-)

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!

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

Hi glomph - the other writeLaTeX founder here - we were preparing for an update this weekend, weren't anticipating being posted on HN again! Should be running faster shortly.