
A Community Of More Than 1M - beck5
https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2017/02/13/one-million-latex-users.html
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filleokus
Awesome to see that they have grown so much. I've used ShareLaTeX since 2013
and really love it. The sharing functions are great, no need to install and
manage a LaTeX installation and all plugins is just awesome. Their support
pages are awesome also, whenever I google for stuff like "center align image
latex" it's either some StackExchange page or their support page that's the
top results.

Can't recommend it enough!

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wuschel
I used MiKTeX LaTeX for my thesis, so I had to learn - as many other PhD
candidates - some of the troubles with this typesetting system the hard way.

I had a quick look at ShareLateX in order to help my sister with her latex
experience. While I can not say anything about larger documents, the ease of
DVI previewing in the browser, etc, it for sure gave me the opportunity to
debug some of her code in small pieces, test out LaTeX example code, and share
the results with my sister.

Nice project - best of luck and keep up the good work!

Edit: for typos

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zmitri
I've used this service a few times and have to say it's fantastic. Compared to
setting up LaTeX on a mac to manipulate a few docs every now and then, it's a
dream.

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danieldk
Just FYI, LaTeX on the Mac is just one `brew cask install mactex` away.

Of course, the collaboration features of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf are great. We
wrote two of our last papers with Overleaf.

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BrandiATMuhkuh
I'm using sharelatex since about 4 years for all my papers and even my PhD
thesis. It's really convenient when writing with many co-authors.

The way we pay practically $0 for infinity authors and projects is, we have
only one payed account and this one invites everyone else.

One thing I miss is the annotation feature google-docs provides. However, the
/todo packages is kinda helpful.

~~~
jpallen
Regarding the annotation features of Google Docs, this is something we're beta
testing at the moment:
[https://www.sharelatex.com/beta/participate](https://www.sharelatex.com/beta/participate).
Come and give it a shot and let us know what you think!

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lunchladydoris
I wonder how many of those 1M users pay? I saw that it's free for personal
use.

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jpallen
I can't give exact numbers, but we have a conversion rate in the (very) low
single digits. It's plenty to support our costs and development team though
(we're purposefully optimised for a healthy cash-flow positive business,
rather than for massive growth). Our churn rate is pretty terrible compared to
what most people would look for in a SAAS app, but that makes sense when you
consider the academic yearly cycle, and that a lot of people only use LaTeX
for a short period in their life while they are a student.

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javajosh
Do you have numbers on your active users?

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jpallen
Around 200,000 monthly active users.

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_red
LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation
(letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.

Its included in nearly every *nix system and generally syntax is much easier
to handle (a doc with no syntax embedded still produces reasonable results).

Notwithstanding the wonderful 'mom' package, its shame development has seemed
to dry up.

~~~
danieldk
_LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation
(letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice._

I had my troff phase, but I don't see why I'd want to write troff directly for
simpler documents if I can just write in org-mode or Markdown and convert it
to a myriad of formats (including LaTeX and HTML). With org-mode I can also
run inline code snippets, feed tables directly to gnuplot, use org-mode's
todo/agenda functionality, etc.

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revelation
Why on earth is the users graph tilted, unless of course the number of users
suddenly hit zero on the first of January.

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pbhjpbhj
I've noticed this same error elsewhere recently. I'm wondering if it's an MS
Excel thing, or similar?

To recapitulate: the end of the graph shows the value for the final date on
the x-axis as zero. This gives the appearance that the graph has been rotated
a few degrees anti-clockwise.

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torrent-of-ions
It wouldn't surprise me. ExHell makes it incredible easy to make the shoddiest
of plots.

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tech_browser
Question for jpallen if you're still reading - do you plan to support unicode
fonts? I write some documents using the Sanskrit2003 font and compile them
with xelatex locally. Wondering if sharelatex plans to support non-commercial
unicode fonts?

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jpallen
Do the instructions at [https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2013/04/02/using-your-
favour...](https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2013/04/02/using-your-favourite-
fonts-with-sharelatex.html) work for you? We've supported unicode and XeLaTeX
for a while now, so what you've described should work, but it's hard to say
without specifics (LaTeX can be difficult with these sort of edge cases, but
if something is broken, please send us a small example to
support@sharelatex.com and we can take a look).

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tech_browser
Great thank you

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Sean1708
What does bootstrapped mean in this context?

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jpallen
We haven't taken any VC funding

