

ShareLaTeX Cloud Compiler - sciurus
https://www.sharelatex.com/github/

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bmfd30
[https://www.writelatex.com/](https://www.writelatex.com/) has worked well for
me in the past.

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sciurus
Have you tried [https://www.sharelatex.com](https://www.sharelatex.com) ? I'd
be interested in a comparison.

One thing I like about ShareLaTeX, in addition to its features, is that it's
open source. [https://github.com/sharelatex](https://github.com/sharelatex)

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na85
I've always felt Google Docs should implement a LaTeX compiler.

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sjtrny
Real-time collaborative editing of a LaTeX document sounds like a nightmare to
me. You would need to be extremely diligent about breaking the document up
into a set of sub documents and who is touching each part of the document.

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allegory
This. LaTeX isn't even particularly easy to merge so its a pain in offline VCS
systems even. Real time; no idea how that would work.

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cben
I have edited in writeLaTeX intensively (2-3 people working simultaneously up
to a deadline), without any file division or section "locking" and merging was
much less of a problem than with version control. The overhead was certainly
lower than carefully coordinating who-is-touching-what.

* much of this was sitting in one room. Not sure how crucial that is but a shared voice and/or chat channel for before-submission sprints can never hurt.

* I'm comparing to a VC experience where most authors don't know the VC well, are afraid of conflicts => postpone update & commits (certainly don't break up commits into semantically closed steps) => get bigger conflicts and suffer more... My sample^Wanecdote size is <10 but I'm afraid this is representative of academic users. (would love to see wider data!)

* I'm talking about collaboration where people don't have time to regularly review others' changes, just work on the current version. If you practice change review, you're better off with VC or something like Draft.

Broken compilation was a bit annoying - whenever one person breaks something
others can't see their changes in PDF until it's fixed. wL mitigates it a tiny
bit with editor tweaks, notably closing {} when you press {. In an ideal world
one's edits would happen "on a branch" and wouldn't be merged if they don't
compile. This is hard as the comfortable real time editing latency is below
latex compile time.

There is an opinion document authors _don 't need_ version control because
unlike programming there is no build to break. I agree real time is better but
disagree on the motivation: with documents you _can 't afford_ version control
because there is no build nor tests to break; without ability to notice merge
bugs, minimizing branching is your defense.

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brewdad
Why even offer an annual plan if there's no discount to be had?

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beck5
people like to have one bill which they can expense to the university.

