Live data from Hacker News

ShareLaTeX

sharelatex.com

21–30 of 63 posts

Re: ShareLaTeX

#21
post #5

Just few days ago I was saying that I wish Google docs could handle latex. Now this looks perfect! I will be sharing this with my advisor and other students and see whether we can use it.

LateX Lab was/is exactly that: http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/

A demo is up and running at http://docs.latexlab.org/

* not affiliated with the project in anyway, just remember using it awhile back.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#22
post #8

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…

> I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment 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 collaborat…

massive get out clause, its 3am in London and I have been drinking

I have looked into pdf.js and semi implemented it however it was only really worth it for firefox users, other browsers generally had a better experience natively, not that I am ruling it out forever but at the time I went for keeping it simple.

Seeing others cursors would be great. I am using the ace editor and that does not natively suport more than once cursor atm, if I had more time I may implement it myself but to be honest it is not going to happen in the very short term.

behind the scenes it is just a fully instance of tex-live 2011 which should cover 95% of needs. For other packaged which are available I am hoping people request them for the moment and I install them, for obvious reasons I am wary of allowing people the ability to install global packages on my server.

On first name and last name, you are right not really needed, same goes for email confirmation. I have been planning on killing those for a while but just hasn't happened!

Re: ShareLaTeX

#23
post #5

Just few days ago I was saying that I wish Google docs could handle latex. Now this looks perfect! I will be sharing this with my advisor and other students and see whether we can use it.

LateX Lab was/is exactly that: http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/ A demo is up and running at http://docs.latexlab.org/ * not affiliated with the project in anyway, just remember using it awhile back.

Latex lab development seemed to have stopped over a year ago before they implemented real time collaberation, if it had continued I would have not have started sharelatex.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hah! I don't think I'll take that bet :-) 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)

Thank you, I am always happy to abuse a contact ;)

Re: ShareLaTeX

#25
post #17

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.

I actually ended up writing my thesis using Eclipse with two plugins, one to support latex and one to support git, and that worked surprisingly well.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#26
Nice! I can't tell if your site is just HN bombed or my internet is choking again (been going on alllll day).

Looking forward to giving it a spin!

Re: ShareLaTeX

#27
post #25
post #17

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.

I actually ended up writing my thesis using Eclipse with two plugins, one to support latex and one to support git, and that worked surprisingly well.

Git is the best if you are working on LaTeX by yourself, I wrote my dissertation last summer using it extensively. However writing LaTeX is different from code for many reasons, for one if you write a new class in e.g. c# all other classes do not care about the implementation, just what can the put in and what do they get out. With LaTeX that doesn't work, you duplicate yourself and get the narrative in the wrong order, they are very different paradigms. I am planning on writing a blog post on this soon.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#28
post #26

Nice! I can't tell if your site is just HN bombed or my internet is choking again (been going on alllll day). Looking forward to giving it a spin!

yep just wen down for about 2 mins. Back up now. getting on HN was not planned at all!

Re: ShareLaTeX

#29
post #28
post #26

Nice! I can't tell if your site is just HN bombed or my internet is choking again (been going on alllll day). Looking forward to giving it a spin!

yep just wen down for about 2 mins. Back up now. getting on HN was not planned at all!

Managed to load the homepage. I'll be digging through now, it looks great. Hot damn it even catches errors! :)

Re: ShareLaTeX

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment 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 collaborat…

massive get out clause, its 3am in London and I have been drinking I have looked into pdf.js and semi implemented it however it was only really worth it for firefox users, other browsers generally had a better experience natively, not that I am ruling it out forever but at the time I went for keeping it simple. Seeing others cursors would be great. I am using the ace editor and that does not natively suport more than…

ACE seems like the best choice; I didn't realize it didn't do remote cursor tracking. Definitely not worth going out of your way for. As for showing the cursor in the PDF preview, even just doing that for the user's own cursor would work quite well.

I definitely wouldn't suggest that you allow people to install new packages globally. However, TeX supports personal LaTeX paths, so users could have their own path with whatever extra packages they needed. (Also, if you ever decide to provide paid-account-only features, that seems like a prime candidate.)

TeXLive definitely covers most needs. Beamer and TikZ represent the biggest things I regularly want that TeXLive doesn't include, and would want to install to a non-project-specific location (since they both have big piles of interacting packages). Other bits, like conference and journal styles, usually come as a single .sty or .cls file that I could easily enough just drop in my project if necessary.

One more thought: I desperately want this to integrate with git, since I version-control almost all of my LaTeX documents.

Post reply on HN