

Write LaTeX - browser-based collaborative editor - nkoren
http://writelatex.com

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beck5
Creator of <http://www.sharelatex.com> here. LaTeX collaboration and
environment setup is a big problem, online collaborative environments are
going to become more popular. The more of them out there the better so good
luck to jdleesmiller and writeLaTeX.

writeLaTeX has a nice split view which I have not implemented yet. The rate of
update from collaborators seems to be relatively slow (compared to
sharelatex). I would be interested in knowing the architecture behind the
scenes.

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jdleesmiller
Thanks for the feedback! Sharelatex is also really cool.

I'll hopefully write a blog post about the infrastructure one day, but it's
actually pretty standard: a rails app on Heroku + some render machines. I'm
pleased to see that it has (so far) scaled as intended!

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friggeri
After using LaTeX for the past ~8 years one thing I have noticed is that
instant preview is not adapted at all: LaTeX compilation is simply too slow. I
prefer compiling when I want to see how things turn out after making a bunch
of changes rather than having the compiler throw out a bunch of errors — and
breaking my workflow — just because for some reason it decided it should
recompile while I was in the middle of writing a macro.

Another minor quibble I have with these kind of services is that they often
only support [pdf]latex, I'd like to be able to use [xe|lua]tex (after having
a taste of fontspec/unimath I simply can't go back).

Other than that, great project!

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gradstudent
I'm not sure instant preview is a compelling feature. The whole point of LaTeX
is to put content before layout.

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theaeolist
And how is instant preview hindering your ability to put content first?

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_delirium
It doesn't necessarily, but I find myself spending too much time tweaking
visual appearance and layout if I compile too often. I prefer (if I can manage
the self-control) to write up a semantically oriented LaTeX document and then
only do a round of layout-tweaking (e.g. babying the figure-placement
algorithm) at the end.

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shardling
I really wish there were Latex editors that would preview _just the equation
you're currently editing_. I know macros make that tricky, but it would be a
killer feature for anyone getting started with Latex.

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jdleesmiller
I believe that AUCTeX [1] does essentially this in EMACS. It embeds a preview
of each equation into the buffer, but I don't know whether it's smart enough
to handle macros.

[1] <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AUCTeX>

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bmuon
The preview is nice, but I have more faith in <http://sharelatex.com/>
reaching a complete and usable product.

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jdleesmiller
Creator of writeLaTeX here...

Thanks for the feedback. Can I ask what kinds of features / changes you (or
others!) would like to see in the complete product?

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mateja
I have an adviser that hates TeX and would prefer to provide comments but no
edits. I would love to see an environment where I could both collaborate with
other students on writing the TeX, but also have the ability to enable peer
review with Crocodoc-style [1] commenting and annotation.

[1] <https://crocodoc.com/>

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brettcvz
Seems like a perfect use for filepicker.io

It's self-promoting, but actually it'd be really nice to be able to open files
from dropbox/github and save the pdf's when their done. Then I could actually
get work done on my chromebook

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Kartificial
I am currently writing my master thesis in the almighty LaTeX, and when is was
looking for an editor I also considered these online alternatives like this
one.

The most important feature I came across is multiple files usage. My current
editor (TexStudio) has a neat feature where I use my 'main' document as some
sort of a container. I put the document header (with the packages and
everything) in there and for every chapter I use a different file. This lets
me work on a chapter in a seperate file which does not get me lost in a 1 huge
file when looking up stuff in the content.

It also shows a tree of your document structure per
chapter/section/subsection/subsubsection so you can navigate easily through
the document. This might be a useful feature for this online alternative.

Also, compiling from one of the chapter files actually compiles the entire
document, which is nice (because otherwise it'll complain that is has no
document structure, packages, etc).

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jdleesmiller
Creator here...

Great feedback! I mostly use writeLaTeX for smaller projects (papers, talks,
short notes), so I haven't done much on multiple file support. Some of the
other online editors (e.g. scribtex and sharelatex) have better support for
multiple files, I think.

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Kartificial
Ok, did not know that :)

Well, maybe multiple files are not all that necessary, but a tree showing the
document structure and enabling you to jump to a certain section with one
click in the tree would be nice :)

Good luck on the project.

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jcheng
If you don't know about it already, you might find SyncTeX useful--it's a
feature of a lot of TeX editors.

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firepoet
Love this app! I find myself writing a lot of LaTeX documents lately, and can
see a lot of potential. I would love to see things like templates, user
accounts, and/or even integration with Google Docs! Being able to upload and
download stuff to my Google Drive would be killer...

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emiliobumachar
Very good! Configuring a LaTex environment in a new computer was a pain for
me. This took that pain away.

But I still can't type in Portuguese, with 'áàãç' (without escaping and coding
everything). That would be a killer feature for me.

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jdleesmiller
I think it may help if you include this package: \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
Does that work?

Thanks for the feedback!

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rbonvall
I like it, kudos! While I don't see myself ever leaving Vim, I think
WriteLaTeX (or something similar) could easily become the standard way for
introducing beginners to LaTeX.

The only missing features I can think of are: snippets for environments
(tables, figures, beamer frames, etc.), base templates (report, book, beamer
presentation, letter, CV) and maybe interactive wizards for more complicated
stuff (for example, a grid-like input for the tabular environment).

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jdleesmiller
Creator here...

Thanks -- very good suggestions! I also miss vim when I'm in writeLaTeX, but
there is a vim mode for the CodeMirror editor component, which I've been
meaning to try out.

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denzil_correa
The "Preview" is a killer feature. You need to make it more responsive though
- currently (probably due to server load) there's a lot of lag. However, if
you want to develop this into a full fledged project it should "just work"
without waiting for some time for the preview to load. This includes the
errors which you load in the Tex editor too. Both the instant error and
preview features are great but you've somehow got to make it scale.

~~~
jdleesmiller
Creator here...

Thanks! The current load on the servers is a factor in the current delays.
I've also made some progress on reducing the render times, but unfortunately
that did not come soon enough for the current traffic spike. Watch this
space...

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jpallen
I've done quite a bit of work getting a scalable cloud LaTeX compiler set up
(<http://clsi.scribtex.com>). Send me an email at james@scribtex.com if you'd
like to chat about some of the issues that you might be facing. LaTeX is
surprisingly good at running quickly and efficiently once you tweak it a bit!

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brianto2010
This is a _huge_ stretch, but will there be any support for noweb?

Whenever I use LaTeX, it's usually for math/physics/stat homework where either
computation or graphs are involved. It would be lovely if I could somehow
inject (for example)

    
    
        <<echo=FALSE,fig=TRUE>>=
        x <- -5:5
        y <- (x - 2)^2 - 5
    
        plot(x, y)
        @
    

into the page and have a graph show up.

~~~
jdleesmiller
Creator here...

That would be really cool -- I use Sweave and R a lot, and I often wish I
could do this in writeLaTeX, but I haven't made much progress on it. The
server side would be pretty complicated.

For simple plots, it's amazing what you can do in LaTeX with pgfplots and
similar -- e.g. <http://writelatex.com/4134bzfwng>

Thanks for the comment!

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lorenzfx
while this is awesome, I can't imagine anyone in my research group trusting a
not submitted paper to a site like this. For on-site usage I hacked together a
similar site in minutes when etherpad-lite came out ( you can try it out at
<http://brutus.lostpackets.de/ethertex/ethertex.py> ) , but sadly I lack the
time to make it really usable.

~~~
jdleesmiller
Creator here...

Thanks for the feedback and the cool demo. writeLaTeX is also something I
hacked together for my own use, but I have been adding to it gradually over
the last year.

That's a fair point about trust. I guess I could package it up as a VM for
people to run on their own servers, if there was enough demand, but I think
centralised hosting has many benefits, especially for collaborative work.

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legomaster
As someone who used to write a lot of LaTeX documents, this just isn't up to
snuff yet. It's slow (which they can fix) but what would make it really
helpful is hints in LaTeX commands and support for packages. I haven't tried
any complex documents yet, hopefully a full 200 page doc with biblo and index
would render correctly as well. It's cool though, I hope it does end up
working well.

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jdleesmiller
Creator here...

Thanks for your comments!

There is a full TeXLive distribution on the back end, so all of the packages
are there (including beamer, tikz, bibliography, etc.). The editor is
CodeMirror, so the underlying infrastructure for auto-complete is there; I
just haven't had a chance to try it out. I mostly use writeLaTeX for short
documents (papers, talks, etc.), so I've never tried it with a 200-page
document -- current page limit for the auto-preview is 30, but that's a bit
arbitrary.

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jdleesmiller
Hi, I'm the author of writeLaTeX.

Sorry if you get slow previews -- I am bringing some extra capacity online
now...

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theaeolist
Very nice! I particularly liked the low-overhead sharing via unique URLs. No
accounts, no signup.

I also thought the delay in the preview (whether intended or not) was a nice
touch, preventing syntax errors being issued while typing is in progress.

I can see myself using this regularly.

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jghrng
Cool, I just found out it works for beamer, too. Having instant preview for
presentations is great, as I often find myself moving figures around all the
time.

Great work!

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dddejan
Cool. Don't know what's the end game for the project, but it would be awesome
if this was open source and I could install it on my own server.

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dsirijus
Preview doesn't work for me on latest stable Chrome and Win 7.

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jdleesmiller
Sorry about that -- it was probably due to server load. I have brought more
capacity on line, and previews should be working better now.

