

Show HN: Paperman – LaTeX editor with a Markdown feel - patricklorio
http://paperman.patricklorio.com

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misnome
I tried a "\begin{equation}" pair to get a numbered equation and nothing
happened.

I would say "Markdown editor with latex inline equations" instead of calling
this a latex editor - the most basic latex syntax doesn't seem to work!

(also: Isn't $$ an out-of-line equation, rather than a \displaystyle-sized
inline)

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wall_words
If you want to generate LaTeX from Markdown, you can use Pandoc. Pandoc has
various extensions to regular Markdown (including inline math, tables, etc.),
so this gives you some flexibility when producing more complicated types of
documents. In fact, Pandoc converts from Markdown to LaTeX to PDF when you
choose PDF as the output format.

~~~
Terretta
_Love_ Pandoc. Recommend it highly for trans-format needs.

Have also found that Texts > Pandoc > (whatever) works very well for non-
techies -- think Texts (a "Markdown word processor") needs more love:

[http://www.texts.io/](http://www.texts.io/)

~~~
giancarlostoro
Texts says it's Cross-Platform, and even has a (misleading) picture of Tux in
the same page, yet no Linux version whatsoever?

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sigvef
This is the same approach we're using at Wikipendium[1] for math-heavy article
editing - Markdown with inline LaTeX math segments edited in a CodeMirror
editor. It's cool to see others tackling the same problems in similar ways.

We use Mathjax[2] for rendering LaTeX client side, but have run into some
performance issues as the number of math segments increase on a single page.
Paperman seems to be using something called MathQuill[3], has anyone here
tried using it on large amounts of LaTeX math? KaTeX[4] is another possible
alternative, and certainly the best I've tried in terms of performance,
although it's still a little lacking in terms of symbol support.

[1]: [https://www.wikipendium.no/](https://www.wikipendium.no/) [2]:
[http://www.mathjax.org/](http://www.mathjax.org/) [3]:
[http://mathquill.com/](http://mathquill.com/) [4]:
[http://khan.github.io/KaTeX/](http://khan.github.io/KaTeX/)

~~~
laughinghan
Whenever there are too many equations rendered with MathQuill in the Desmos
Graphing Calculator ([http://desmos.com](http://desmos.com)), there are
definite performance issues, but we're working on them! Definitely hoping to
borrow some tricks from the very impressive KaTeX.

Full Disclosure: I have worked for Desmos, and I'm still the creator and
maintainer for MathQuill.

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m_mueller
Here's what I'd need as a minimum to make productive use of this:

* numbered list

* download LaTeX

What I'd consider paying for:

* a nice table editor - IMO this is the only case where it would make sense to divert from the text-input-only approach.

* Load LaTeX templates, have all of the common packages supported, so that I could just write papers online.

* Integration with DropBox and/or Google Drive

~~~
patricklorio
This is great. I'll try and get these features implemented.

~~~
m_mueller
Nice little project btw. - Online Latex is IMO a not yet solved problem,
however others have a big head start and I imagine the whole thing gets
complex very quickly - especially considering LaTex build times. If you want
to offer the full functionality with all packages and everything, your service
basically becomes a PaaS and you'll have to charge for access. Yet this is
something that quite a few people could be interested in, since getting a
LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today. The problem
with the business model is that it's _really hard_ to try to charge money to
academia, especially for things that are basically non-essential, even if they
improve productivity.

Btw. if you still want to go that route, I'd look into Docker. Basically you
can give every paying user an isolated container where he's running his jobs.
This has quite a few advantages:

\- more secure, since processes are isolated.

\- easily scalable, especially with their hipache router in front of it. Each
process sees the same port internally, Docker manages the mapping from global
ports to local ones, hipache manages failover / load balancing.

\- easy to separate into base functionality / pro packages for your business
model - have a base image and an extended one with all the packages.

~~~
jimhefferon
> getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today

People often say that. I find that assertion puzzling. I use LaTeX for hours
everyday, so I think I exercise a lot of the functionality, but to install I
just follow the brief directions on the TeX Live site (I don't use MiKTeX but
I understand it to also install smoothly). Could I ask what part of the
installation gives trouble?

~~~
m_mueller
When it comes to LaTex I decide the environment (OS / LaTeX distro) by which
editor is supported. So far I still find 'Kile' the best editor by far. Which
is why I have a Kubuntu VM just for that purpose. For the templates that I use
there's a whole host of packages that I need - and the package names of course
don't match in apt-get and in LaTex, so it basically becomes a 'guess what
error message means which package is missing / try to google for all that'
until everything runs. I don't know about you, but I don't call that smooth.

~~~
jimhefferon
Personally, I just get everything. That is, I'd get the whole MacTeX
distribution. Never need to worry too much then. (At least on Ubuntu, the
stuff from apt-get is often years old, which doesn't matter sometimes, but
does matter often enough to be annoying, in my experience.)

~~~
m_mueller
As I wrote - I don't use MacTeX because I like Kile. On Ubuntu so far I
haven't found an apt-get package that contains really 'everything'.

~~~
edwintorok
Is there anything missing from 'apt-get install texlive-full'?

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yiyus
I wrote a kind of markdown to latex script to help me writing my thesis, based
in previous versions of md2html.awk. It had some more features than Paperman,
such as ((footnotes)), [[bib references]] and [(references to labels)]. It
also supported several heading levels, an abstract at the beginning, and even
had some support for images and tables.

It was never publicly released because, since it was for my personal use,
required a serious amount of work to make it usable for more people and better
(or at least some) documentation. Anyway, if somebody is interested, I have no
problem sharing it.

~~~
misnome
Have you had a look at pandoc? It sounds like something a bit similar (for
future reference).

~~~
jhallenworld
Pandoc does look cool- I will have to try it. I wonder which input format is
the most useful (has the best balance of features and ease of use) for it. For
example, can I use markdown if I need references?

I wrote a preprocessor for plain TeX for chip documentation. You type 'make
view' in your documentation source directory to convert text into pdf and view
it with acrobat. It was interesting to write this to see how to make a full
"style" for TeX.

The input is somewhat like markdown in that all ASCII characters print as is
except \\. Use \\\ to print \, otherwise it's TeX: "see table \ref{tag} on
page \pageref{tag}."

It supports math in that you can calculate derived table entries:

    
    
    		|Position		|Size		|
    		|\{D+DR}		|\{3}		|
    		|\{D+DR}		|\{22}		|
    		|\{D+DR}		|\{2}		|
    		|\{0}			|\{5}		|
    

'D' means get the value from the cell below. 'DR' means get the value from the
cell down and to the right. Also you can assign to and use variables in any
order \\{a*2} prints 20 because later I set \\{a=10}.

[https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/tree/master/doc/nice...](https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/tree/master/doc/nicetex)

------
chatmasta
I started using Latex with editors like this (sharelatex I think), but
eventually, when my advisor said "latex is source code," I came to the
realization that I should be writing in my text editor.

Now I do all latex writing in sublime or vim and have a build script to
compile to Pdf and open it in Preview on the left side of my screen. Save,
build, review. Just as fast as an online editor, no lockin, and a native
feeling.

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jvdh
If you want authors to actually write (scientific) papers in this editor
you'll need a lot more:

    
    
      * including figures, with captions
      * tabels, with captions
      * sections
      * Something like the \ref{} command to refer to tables, figures, sections.
      * Citations

------
beggi
I'd say it's Markdown editor with limited LaTeX support but whatever. It's
very cool.

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grayclhn
Emacs orgmode is an exceptional LaTeX editor with a markdown feel. Citations,
numbered/aligned equations, tables, footnotes, etc.

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mostelato
I use something identical to this:
[https://stackedit.io/](https://stackedit.io/)

~~~
patricklorio
I used that too, however the delay between writing something and seeing the
preview render really bugged me.

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mandalar12
Nice project. Are the source available ? It would be nice to use but I'd
rather host/use it locally.

Besides I don't know which font (Symbola?) you use in the .pdf but it appears
ugly (part of the 'o' is missing and it is overall not too easy to read) on my
laptop running Ubuntu 14.10.

------
mhartl
Those interested in a tool that lets you use your text editor with an auto-
refreshed HTML view should check out Softcover
([http://softcover.io/](http://softcover.io/)), which among other things is
the build system used by the _Ruby on Rails Tutorial_.

------
jbranchaud
The tagline is misleading. This is just a markdown editor with something like
MathJax dropped in to do LaTeX-like equation rendering. Nevertheless, the
live-editing and download PDF features are pretty cool. Nice work!

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thesumofall
Nice demo. Hopefully the time will come when we will finally have a proper
Latex editor that is easy to use and has an editor that makes it a joy to
write with (think of iA Writer)

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beerbajay
Good idea, as latex editing can be incredibly slow, but the math support
failed on my first test case: $$A = \sum_{n=-\infty}^{+\infty} f(x)$$

~~~
Argorak
Can you elaborate? Most editors have SyncTeX ([http://mactex-
wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX](http://mactex-
wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX)) support and most viewers can handle
that. You can pretty easily build on every change. Also, when the document
becomes long, you can split it in multiple parts that only get rebuilt if they
change. That's a sane way of organizing things anyways.

I never had any performance probs.

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Dorian-Marie
I love it, I always thing LaTeX documents are the best looking PDF out there,
but I write Markdown files because that's so much easier.

~~~
sjtrny
It's not any easier. You are just more used to Markdown and I'm assuming more
practiced in it. I'm a lot faster in LaTeX than Markdown because I use LaTeX
every day but only touch Markdown about once a month.

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NaNaN
Seems like a linkbait. There is not anything new to me. It's just a Markdown
variant editor with a LaTeX feel.

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atmosx
Is there any editor that can produce that? Can I add custom latex extensions
(e.g. for chemistry)?

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vanna
[http://markx.herokuapp.com](http://markx.herokuapp.com) :)

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sampo
There is something wrong with all the o letters in the pdf that I downloaded.

~~~
patricklorio
I'm using wkhtmltopdf to convert the html to a pdf in the backend. I'll have
to look into this. Thanks.

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zobzu
i would call it a markdown with formulas :)

