

Online collaborative LaTeX editor - fachoper
https://www.writelatex.com/

======
beck5
Founder of <http://www.ShareLaTeX.com> here, the guys at writelatex have done
a great job of making a new clear home page since last time they were on
HackerNews (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385300>) the example
presentation and no sign in required is a really great touch as it helps
quickly bring down the bar for those new to LaTeX.

The online LaTeX editor is not an easy problem to solve, compiling massive
projects (hundreds of megs) elastically with several different compilers is
not something you can crack in a weekend hence why I merge with
<http://www.scribtex.com>.

Good luck to writelatex!

~~~
StevenXC
No sign-in is nice as an option, but the fact that you _can't_ sign in is a
negative for me - I'd like to be able to manage multiple documents and
projects within an account like on ScribTeX.

Oh, and ShareLaTeX looks really good; thanks for sharing! I'm going to try it
out now.

~~~
JohnHammersley
And as if by magic - you can now sign up to manage your docs on writelatex.com
:-)

~~~
cben
"Password is too short (minimum is 8 characters)" - this can lose you users. I
don't want to invent yet another password just to try this out. So offer
feedback on password strength, but let users decide on the
secutity/convenience tradeoff. Better yet, use openid.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks for the feedback - that's a very good point, as it to use openid.

------
stared
The is also <http://www.scribtex.com/> (unfortunately, going down, but was
nice, also supporting Git access), <https://www.sharelatex.com/>.

And for short LaTeX text, there is <http://mathb.in/>.

Also, <http://www.scigit.com/> looks promising (not working yet, though).

See also: [http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/27549/simultaneous-
co...](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/27549/simultaneous-
collaborative-editing-of-a-latex-file)

~~~
beck5
Don't worry we are working hard to get all the functionality of ScribTeX fully
incorporated into ShareLaTeX (git push & pull). We also have no long term
plans on turning off scribtex while people still use it, but the focus is
sharelatex.

~~~
stared
It's how I understood things. However, without possibility to invite
collaborators (to ScribTeX), there is not much use for me. That said, I used
it, liked it a lot, started paying for it... just to discover that I cannot
use it (in terms of, well, collaboration) anymore (so I quit paying, but with
a bitter "you should have warned me when I wanted to pay, not only in the Sign
Up form").

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see git stuff at ShareLaTeX.

Or writeLaTeX.

~~~
beck5
Sorry I don't fully understand, you can invite collaborators on sharelatex
into the project via the project settings area. Free accounts are capped to
having 1 collaborator (1 person + yourself). Please drop me an email
henry.oswald at sharelatex.com

~~~
stared
The comment was about ScribTeX, where I cannot invite others (unless they
already have accounts) but still I can (or at least - could recently) upgrade
to paying plan (without any warning that ScribTeX is no longer accepting new
users).

ShareLaTeX - sure, I know and understand.

------
jdleesmiller
Founder here...

Great to see this on HN! Feedback much appreciated. Happy to answer
questions...

~~~
Beltiras
Have you considered the popular front-end languages like Markdown, org-mode or
any of the plethora of formats that have translators to LaTeX?

~~~
JohnHammersley
Hi Beltiras,

Thanks for the question - we've focused initially on creating a low-barrier-
to-entry front-end for LaTeX, but which still worked in the native language.
Which way we go in future will depend on the feedback we get on writelatex!

~~~
ilyagr
This would be really easy to implement using pandoc
(<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>), which converts Markdown with extensions
and LaTeX formulas into LaTeX. I think it supports Org-mode too.

Markdown would be excellent for sharing short notes and ideas among
mathematicians, as opposed to full-blown papers.

Also, great job! I like how simple and efficient the interface is.

~~~
jdleesmiller
Thanks! This is a great idea --- we'll see what we can do.

------
pseut
I can maybe see myself using this to tweak the last stages of a paper with a
coauthor, but otherwise I can't imagine writing LaTeX without emacs
keybindings (auctex, reftex, cdlatex, I'm leaving them all lowercase because I
can't remember their idiosyncratic capitalization patterns). Case in point: in
trying out your editor, I opened several new browser windows accidentally.

So, is there a way to upload latex and bibtex files?

~~~
jdleesmiller
My documents are full of :w, ct. and kkkjjkk --- we are working on adding
keybindings. :)

Yes, you can upload .tex and .bib files using the file menu.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
pseut
Another thought (as I edit a document that a co-author wrote): if you could
mimic tcilatex.tex (which Scientific Workplace throws into any document it
touches) in a minimal, nonintrusive way, that would be fantastic. (tcilatex
seems to be changing the 'gather' environment so that individual equations can
no longer be numbered, for example.)

~~~
jdleesmiller
OK, we'll have a look. For now, you can upload tcilatex.tex to writeLaTeX and
then \input{tcilatex.tex} after your \documentclass line. (Note: it seems to
conflict with the amsmath package, however.)

Thanks!

------
bnegreve
Wow, it even works with tikz! If it becomes popular, I bet you'll need some
CPUs.

~~~
JohnHammersley
tikz is a great package! Re the CPUs - we're working on some neat ways to get
round this :-)

~~~
dfc
Can you give us any insight into how you plan on getting around this? It seems
that publication quality typesetting and layout requires a certain level of
CPU power, especially with complex graphics from TikZ/PGF and/or pstricks. Do
you think your solutions will also help desktop users reduce the amount of CPU
latex eats?

~~~
jdleesmiller
Good question. There's not much we can do at the LaTeX level, but writeLaTeX
also has to send images of the pages back to browser, and we can improve that
part of the process in quite a few ways.

~~~
cben
Perhaps it would help to checkpoint the compilation periodically, keyed by
hash of input consumed so far, so when adding a word on page 100 you don't
have to load all packages and recompile 100 pages.

\- One approach is fork() processes (the tricky part being flushing all I/O
and redirecting to separate files). This only works in RAM, which means active
users & machine affinity, but I suspect storing checkpoints for long is
useless anyway.

\- Another approach is TeX's builtin memory \dump mechanism. This generates a
file, so you could reuse flexibly, stuff in memcached etc. And easier to set
up. But looking at mylatex.ltx I get the impression you can't \dump from a
process that loaded a dump, so you'd have to start from initial tex and re-
parse all of latex :-(. Perhaps still a gain, at least keeping one dump after
the preamble?

The other half of the problem is getting the page(s) you want quickly without
waiting for the whole document to compile. My impression is pdflatex output is
not valid PDF until it's done. Less of a problem for writelatex which already
does separate images?

~~~
jdleesmiller
Thanks for the suggestions! The fork() idea is very interesting --- I hadn't
thought of that. Drop me a line at john at writelatex.com if you ever want to
chat about tex stuff. :)

------
fox91
It's awesome. I love it!

One feature that would make it much much awesome would be an integration with
Github. In our university we're trying to convince professors to release the
latex source of the lecture notes on Github in order to receive issues or pull
requests from students for typos or improvements. As most teachers don't know
git it would be great if they could open files on writelatex from github and
commit changes. I know that's quite hard to do but imho it could really
improve the project.

p.s.: Is it open source? Will it ever be?

~~~
jdleesmiller
That's a great idea! Integration with github is on our TODO list, so hopefully
we can help with that.

It's not open source, but we're looking at several ways of taking it forward,
and that's one of them.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

------
gibbonsd1
Is it possible to include class files such as ieee.cls? <http://mocha-
java.uccs.edu/ieee/>

~~~
jdleesmiller
Yep, you can upload .cls files using the files menu.

------
mgualt
This seems to work well -- I imagine I would use it if I were using a
temporary computer, an ipad, or some such thing. What would be nice is if I
could integrate it with dropbox or similar services, essentially use it to
edit and compile files in my dropbox library. Also it would be good to use a
standard editor with config files that could be saved to customize the
environment.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks for the comments - glad you liked it! We're working on the offline
integration and user customisation features, they're in the pipeline.

------
joshuagross
Co-founder of <http://www.SpanDeX.io> here, it's cool to see so much
excitement around web-based LaTeX editing. As Henry mentioned, scaling sites
like this is quite challenging as LaTeX wasn't really built for performance or
scaling, but it's still more pleasant than running on your own machine ;) Best
of luck to everyone!

------
fab13n
Real-time rendering is done pretty fast and nicely by whizzytex (sudo apt-get
install whizzytex), if you don't need the collaborative features and are
comfortable with emacs.

This being said, doing it in a web client sounds like no small technical
achievement!

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks - whizzytex is a good package for real-time rendering. What we're
trying to do with writelatex.com is help users get into LaTeX by removing some
of the traditional barriers (needing to install, compile, etc), plus making it
easy for existing users to work on the go and from any comp.

Hope you like the site! :-)

------
sonier
This is awesome! Great work. One must have for me is auto complete, I use
LaTeXila and its hard to move away from auto complete. Spell checking would
also be amazing, I have yet to find a good LaTeX IDE with spell check.

~~~
rmk2
I have been using Emacs for quite a while now. It offers (via AucTeX/RefTeX) a
brilliant solution for bibtex files, references, writing LaTeX, autocompletion
etc. And if you use it in conjunction with either ispell or flyspell (on-the-
fly spell-checking), you basically can use both at the same time.[1] However,
this _might_ be daunting, especially when this means starting and dealing with
Emacs for the first time.

[1]: It might however be necessary to redefine one of the shortcuts for either
flyspell or autocompletion, since they both use the same keys by default.

~~~
sonier
I've always been a vim guy myself. I guess it might be time to learn Emacs and
give this a try.

~~~
guygurari
I write latex in vim using latex-suite and I'm very happy with it. The vim
spell checker also works well in latex files.

------
JohnHammersley
Thanks to all for the feedback - massive spike in traffic, and over 100 users
signed up in the couple of hours since we pushed the site update :-)

More to come soon, and you can follow us @writelatex for the latest.

------
stoodder
This is awesome! I'd also like to share one of my local Wisconsin startups
tackling the same problem: <http://spandex.io/>

------
rcoh
The images in the right pane are blurry for me -- I guess they're getting
stretched out on my monitor. Could you use vector graphics instead of JPGs?

~~~
jdleesmiller
Yes, that's on our TODO list. Thanks for the feedback!

------
Derbasti
Even works on my iPad. Color me extremely impressed!

------
jdleesmiller
Founder here... Just pushed an update so you an sign up and manage your docs.
Enjoy!

~~~
JohnHammersley
This is not the relaxing weekend I had planned! But yes, user accounts now
available, plus a short getting started guide to help new users. As ever, all
feedback appreciated

------
glomph
Seems very slow.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Hi glomph - the other writeLaTeX founder here - we were preparing for an
update this weekend, weren't anticipating being posted on HN again! Should be
running faster shortly.

------
mjcohenw
How well does this work from a Chromebook?

~~~
jdleesmiller
I'm afraid we don't have a Chromebook to test on. We do test on Chrome and
Linux, though, so hopefully it works well.

Thanks!

