
ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface) - frossie
http://scribtex.com/
======
jpallen
Hi, I'm the creator of ScribTeX. I'm a regular reader of HN and it was great
to see this on the front page this morning. Most of my effort is focused on
the technical side of things and I've been relying on word of mouth for
promotion. (Sorry to those of you who have been looking for something like
this for a while!)

Thank you for all the positive comments, they really mean a lot. The
constructive feedback from HN is excellent as always.

For the interested, here are some features I am working on at the moment: *
Better history navigation. The current implementation is quite flat and
cumbersome. * A much better editor. Currently it's just a textbox with syntax
highlighting, but I'm working on something to rival the functionality of a
desktop editor. * Overall design, in particular the splash page and
information pages

Push and pull access to the underlying git repository is currently a feature I
am testing. Send me an email (james@scribtex.com) if you would like me to
enable it for your account.

~~~
auxbuss
I'm wondering whether you could monetize ScribTeX by offering an API to submit
docs and return PDFs.

I can think of examples in the past where I'd have paid for that in a
heartbeat.

Just an idea.

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CoffeeDregs
That's just really nice.

I used LaTeX for two theses and loved it. It was very freeing to just worry
about content and not about layout. When I use Word, I constantly fiddle with
styling and with Word's occasional bizarre behavior (delete a word and the
next paragraph becomes bold... ?!). With LaTeX, I spent an hour up front
defining styles and a few minutes toward the end adjusting styles, but
otherwise just wrote content (in vim!). I don't think I really ever ran into
"OMFG, what is it doing?!" situations.

Okay, so the perfect scenario goes: ScribTex does well; ScribTex gets bought
by Google; Google Docs adds Tex documents!

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Google docs has a latex based equation editor

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-docs-has-
equ...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-docs-has-equation-
editor.html)

~~~
CoffeeDregs
Sweet! Now they just need a LaTex-based doc editor... ;)

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frossie
(I submitted this)

I have zero connection with this site, except it made me very happy when I
found about it today. I can't believe I haven't heard of this before (searchyc
didn't turn anything up).

Granted you may not be as excited if you don't use LaTeX :-)

~~~
mdaniel
Maybe it's because no one (like myself) thought of submitting those kinds of
links.

Observe:

    
    
      https://github.com/jpallen/clsi
      http://code.google.com/p/common-latex-service-interface/
      http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/
      http://www.verbosus.com/
      http://monkeytex.bradcater.webfactional.com/
      and the parent article's service
    

edit: formatting

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krikor
The most attractive feature for a service like this is the collaboration
features. I have a linux box set up for wake on lan and Dropbox so I can
basically do the same thing as long as I have access to a terminal. What would
be great was if the editor with ScribTex was something similar to etherpad had
where multiple users can edit the same document at once and you can see
updates in realtime.

~~~
pauljburke
I found this post this morning, went over there and haven't stopped smiling
yet (sad I know). I threw a couple of 10 page or so assignments at it and
after uploading a couple of .sty files it all went perfectly and rendered
faster than my local machine, which was a bit insulting.

I was a bit taken aback that this has been live since January 2009 (if I'm
reading their blog correctly) since an online LaTex editor is something I look
out for on a semi regular basis (and has been for years).

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riobard
Finally the pain of collaboration on LaTeX text due to installation
differences will be gone! Kudos!

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hootx
I'm very surprised by the speed of compilation. Latexlab (another online latex
editor) isn't nearly as fast. This is a neat tool!

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TheEzEzz
Very cool. This is headed in the right direction.

I think there's a lot of room for improvement in LaTeX editors. For instance:

Suppose I'm reading a PDF compiled draft and spot an error in an equation. It
would be fantastic if I could simply click on the equation and have a mini
text box pop up with the relevant LaTeX code. After editing the LaTeX the PDF
would seamlessly update.

Or suppose I see an embedded figure and want to change its dimensions. It
would be great if I didn't have to guess, compile, check, guess, compile,
check, guess, compile, check, etc. If I could see the result as I edit the
code, or maybe even have a little GUI to click and drag to scale, that would
save me tremendous amounts of time.

I would pay a monthly subscription to have a fast online version of that
software.

~~~
jedbrown
_It would be fantastic if I could simply click on the equation and have a mini
text box pop up with the relevant LaTeX code._

Emacs' AUCTeX preview mode renders your equations and tables within the emacs
buffer. It's not a PDF, but if I understand correctly, there are format
limitations in PDF that prevent instantaneous local updates within a large
document. Preview mode is fast.

------
btw0
Just tested with some chinese characters, showed up as blank in the output pdf
file. No support for languages other than english is not good.

~~~
w1ntermute
LaTeX doesn't support Unicode. You need XeLaTeX for that:
<http://i.imgur.com/Yx9x4.png> (code is at
<http://paste.pocoo.org/show/295774/>)

~~~
_delirium
It's hackish, but you can do Unicode in LaTeX with the _inputenc_ and _ucs_
packages. If you do:

    
    
      \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
      \usepackage{ucs}
    

then the _inputenc_ macro package does a first pass on the document, handing
off all non-ASCII characters to _ucs_ to replace them with LaTeX commands to
generate the appropriate characters, if supported. So, ö gets replaced by
\"{o}, א gets replaced with \hebalef, etc. Doesn't work for everything, but
handles a good portion of common languages.

~~~
w1ntermute
Huh, it worked for ö, but א gave me:

    
    
        ! Undefined control sequence.
        \u-default-1488 #1->\hebalef
    

And the Japanese example above gave me:

    
    
        Package ucs Error: Unknown Unicode character 12371 = U+3053
    

Either way, there's not much of a point in using LaTeX when XeLaTeX is
available, save for intercompatibility. So until sites like this one start
moving to XeTeX/XeLaTeX, we'll still often be stuck without (true) Unicode.

~~~
jpallen
I agree, ScribTeX needs support for XeTeX and other LaTeX compilers. As the
creator of the site, I guess I'm in a unique position to make this happen!
It's been on my todo list for a while now and isn't without its difficulties,
but I'll use this conversation as renewed motivation to get it done.

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scorpion032
Latex compiling is precisely a kind of thing I'd do on _my machine_ than on a
web service.

Who in this world knows Latex but doesn't have access to a machine to compile
it into a pdf?

While I really like how well the site has been done, I have a hard time
imagining how it would be a success, in the market.

~~~
lenni
My brother is writing his thesis in Economics soon and we live at different
ends of our country. I'm trying to convince him that Latex is the way to go
and being able to do online help sessions would help _a lot_.

Besides, to someone who has only ever used WYSIWYG installing compilers and
the like is really complicated.

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doki_pen
I wish I could up vote this more. I've tried LaTeX a few times and I think the
reason I don't go back more often is because I have to install it and remember
how to compile. This makes it much easier to get your feet wet.

~~~
kleiba
Are you sure _hacker_ news is the right place for you? ;-) j/k

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ziweb
I just tried a medium sized file. About 3 pages. It just says loading......

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nickik
Awsome! Arrived exactly in the write moment :)

