11–20 of 63 posts
This is a legit startup idea. I can see my professors, research advisors, and myself using this for sure. Collaborative research documentation is a great idea. I hope others will see what I see, and use your service. Awesome job BTW.
Looks amazing. Compiles fast, supports packages, and the error logs are much better than what I use. That said, it would be nice to be able to download the files with one click, sync with dropbox, and maybe have support for versions or diffs?
There is no version control at the moment. I am working on how to implement this and diffs in a user friendly way soon. Basically git is not the answer for collaborative LaTeX in my option, a different more dynamic and simpler way is needed which I am working on.
Great concept and nice looking implementation, Henry! I'd not remembered to check it out since you mentioned it in the pub the other (last?) week, but I'll definitely kick the tyres over the weekend :-)
£10 says it goes down in the next 6 hours.
Does it have integration with Dropbox or some other file sharing service? That, IMHO, would be a killer feature!
A really sweet potential feature request: dropbox integration. Then I could work on my dissertation from anywhere, and always have a few extra backups.
Great concept and nice looking implementation, Henry! I'd not remembered to check it out since you mentioned it in the pub the other (last?) week, but I'll definitely kick the tyres over the weekend :-)
Ha ha, hello John! I have since left the land of ec2 and this is running happily on a small linode instance, found it much faster for my monry. Yes my db's are in a totally different datacenter to my server but I don' think the site is that slow. £10 says it goes down in the next 6 hours.
I'm bored this w/e, so do get in touch and let me know if I can lend a hand with some back-end systems tuning ... email, or via the phone number on m'webshite (also on devwiki, under "contact numbers" IIRC)
I'd really like to see a prominently linked privacy policy. Not that I'm particularly concerned with you stealing my work-in-progress, but just as an easy-to-see assurance that such things won't happen. A really sweet potential feature request: dropbox integration. Then I could work on my dissertation from anywhere, and always have a few extra backups.
Hi creator here, just got in from a few beers to see on HN which is amazing to see! I've only been coding for about 20+ months or so and this has been my evening/weekend project for the past few months, its a very new site, only out for about 5 weeks now. There are still lots of things to improve but the feedback has been amazing. I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment, deep down I want to offer free a service…
So you'll have half as much traffic in 100.5 days? :)
More seriously, this looks awesome. I do all almost all of my writing in LaTeX, including papers, presentations, and random other documents. I've tried to collaborate on LaTeX documents before, but unlike many other types of text documents, the collaboration didn't work very well: the editors that could do collaboration didn't integrate with rapid compilation and previewing, and the editors that do rapid compilation and previewing don't do collaboration.
Have you considered using PDF.js to display the PDF in real-time in the browser next to the LaTeX document? Put that together with something like SyncTeX, and you could show your (or everyone's) current cursor position in the rendered document in real-time. Various tricks also exist to render LaTeX documents more quickly to allow for real-time previewing, such as those used in WhizzyTeX http://cristal.inria.fr/whizzytex/ .
Integration between the BibTeX bits and some form of online reference tracking would make a lot of sense: hit one bookmarklet or browser plugin button on a paper you want to reference, and end up with a new reference in your .bib file.
The biggest question I immediately have: how well does this handle documents that need random packages you don't already have in your TeX installation? From Beamer and TikZ to conference and journal styles to random obscure formatting packages, I don't want to find out in a crunch that I can't easily use any package I need. Do you have any compatibility issues with random TeX and LaTeX packages, perhaps due to the need to run them in a secure server environment? Do I have to add all the individual packages into my project, or can I have them as common elements across my projects? Similarly, can I share my own .bib files and packages across projects?
On that note, what about images and arbitrary data files I might need to include, such as from \includegraphics or
What TeX implementation do you use behind the scenes? TeXLive, I hope?
How do I know what versions you use? What happens when you upgrade? TeX itself might keep backward compatibility forever, but random LaTeX packages don't always maintain that property.
First-impression question: why do you ask for my first and last name, rather than just an email address and password? Do you want it to fill in \author{} automatically? Please say up front what you need it for. Either way, never ask for "first name" and "last name", just ask for "full name", which will work for more people. http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names