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ShareLaTeX

sharelatex.com

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Re: ShareLaTeX

#31

Post by hdevalence2 »

beck5 wrote: 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…

Hey, this is really great (and a strange coincidence -- this afternoon I was thinking about building something similar).

Something I'm wondering about: I currently use vim-latexsuite which has a bunch of expansion features. For instance, if you type '^^' it expands to '^{}', where the '' are jump markers, and then 'jumps' into the first marker. So if I wanted to type e.g., 'e^{-x/2}', the keystrokes I'd use would be 'e ^ ^ - x / 2 CTRL-J'.

I'm not sure how you'd do the something similar, but the combination of jump markers and user-defined expansions (e.g., I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{}{}' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}' ) saves an enormous amount of time writing TeX.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#32

Post by skystorm »

Great idea and I like what I'm seeing so far. I assume it's based on pdflatex, as opposed to latex + dvipdf / (dvips + ps2pdf) ?

FWIW, I just imported a document I'm working on to check things out. It gives a bunch of warnings (underfull \hbox) but other than that works fine on my system -- on your site, however, I can't get to the PDF, it keeps jumping to the Logs screen with the warnings...

Re: ShareLaTeX

#33

Post by JadeNB »

hdevalence2 wrote: post #31
beck5 wrote: 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…

Hey, this is really great (and a strange coincidence -- this afternoon I was thinking about building something similar). Something I'm wondering about: I currently use vim-latexsuite which has a bunch of expansion features. For instance, if you type '^^' it expands to '^{ } ', where the ' ' are jump markers, and then 'jumps' into the first marker. So if I wanted to type e.g., 'e^{-x/2}', the keystrokes I'd use would…

> I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{}{}' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}'

Out of curiosity, why do all these in your editor rather than in TeX? For example, `\def\QQ{\mathbb Q}` would work just fine, and be only one more keystroke. (The third example could be made into a parametrised macro, but `\frac` is already such a macro, so I guess that you're really valuing the keystrokes.)

Re: ShareLaTeX

#34

Post by JadeNB »

beck5 wrote: post #14
zzleeper wrote: post #7

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?

You can download the source files with maybe 2 clicks? (settings -> download zip). 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.

> 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.

This sounds very interesting. Could you elaborate at all, particularly on what 'more dynamic' means?

Re: ShareLaTeX

#35

Post by pbnjay »

starwed wrote: post #25
pbnjay wrote: 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.

yeah I just use vim/git for everything.

I did write a makefile to do the monotonous stuff for me (create pdf, generate figures with graphviz, fetch bibtex from zotero, etc). one of those instances of procrastination instead of writing which i can at least justify.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#36

Post by msutherl »

Hey, just tried it out with the IEEEtran template and it didn't work:

http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishin...

I did upload the class file and the document points to it explicitly.

You can check out the errors here: https://www.sharelatex.com/project/4f2cc71be369403e73004116 (awesome that I can do this!)

This is really great, I'm going to tell all of my academic friends/collaborators about it. This is a _huge_ improvement over version control (for non-geeks) or Dropbox sharing, not to mention email, which a shocking number of people seem to still use.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#37

Post by hdevalence2 »

JadeNB wrote: post #33
hdevalence2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is really great (and a strange coincidence -- this afternoon I was thinking about building something similar). Something I'm wondering about: I currently use vim-latexsuite which has a bunch of expansion features. For instance, if you type '^^' it expands to '^{ } ', where the ' ' are jump markers, and then 'jumps' into the first marker. So if I wanted to type e.g., 'e^{-x/2}', the keystrokes I'd use would…

> I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{ }{ } ' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}' Out of curiosity, why do all these in your editor rather than in TeX? For example, `\def\QQ{\mathbb Q}` would work just fine, and be only one more keystroke. (The third example could be made into a parametrised macro, but `\frac` is already such a macro, so I guess that you…

It sort of depends. For the blackboard bold, it's not really much difference between doing it in the editor and doing it as TeX macros. I used to do them in TeX, but after I started doing other things in the editor I switched them for no particular reason outside of consistency. Also, expansions for words like function, holomorphic, 'the following are equivalent', 'if and only if', etc., are problematic to do as TeX macros, because of issues around spacing, and because it's simply more readable.

For the others, it is really about the keystrokes -- one has to be able to type really fast to keep up in a lecture or a talk, and then once you've optimized for speed, why not type that quickly all the time?

Re: ShareLaTeX

#39

Post by beck5 »

JadeNB wrote: post #34
beck5 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download the source files with maybe 2 clicks? (settings -> download zip). 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.

> 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. This sounds very interesting. Could you elaborate at all, particularly on what 'more dynamic' means?

Well I only half know what that means as well, bit of a buz word. I basically mean you need to see things happening in real time.

Stolen from another comment I made about writing latex:

"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."

Basically other systems have this down, classically google docs and either pad, but they are just for normal text. I would love to be able to have a wrapped git blame on the site, one you can see in real time.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#40

Post by beck5 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #30
beck5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having individual user paths with style files and other packages is something I have thought about. I think for my premium account I will probably only offer unlimited accounts and perhaps continuions compiling behind the scenes looking for errors. It is quite important to me to offer a full service for free.

on git: I want to add some sort of versioning, my current plan is to do a nice friendly wrapper around a single branch on git. This could then be pulled from for peoples peace of mind but probably not pushed to. My thinking is git is hard, I use it all day as a dev and I am still googling how to do things, if you are a mathematician yes you have the ability to learn it but you shouldn't have to and probably can't be bothered to.

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