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ShareLaTeX

sharelatex.com

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: ShareLaTeX

#41
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…

Pleased to hear it wasn't a mad idea to build the site! I don't personally write the vim command and tbh they are just vi movement bindings which come along with the ace editor - http://ace.ajax.org/

I am an avid vim user and I would also love more powerful bindings.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#42

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...

Yep its pdflatex, could you let me know which project that is so via the feedback form so I can investigate?

Re: ShareLaTeX

#43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sing…

With few exceptions, most of the papers and presentations I've written get finished, tagged, archives, and never touched again. Sometimes I'll start a new presentation and take some material from a previous one, but I still typically do so as a new document. Given a model like that (which seems fairly standard in research), unlimited projects wouldn't really affect me much, since I can just delete projects I've finished with. (I wouldn't keep the canonical original on ShareLaTeX anyway.)

Do you expect many people to keep a giant pile of still-edited documents on ShareLaTeX?

Regarding git: using it for basic built-in versioning seems useful, but in my case I actually don't want to treat ShareLaTeX as the canonical source of the document and keep the git repository there. I'd just like to use ShareLaTeX as an editor, and keep the Git repo elsewhere. I don't know offhand the best way to support that, though. Pushing to ShareLaTeX to edit and pulling back when done to push to the canonical repo could work, and it seems like the simplest option, since you can safely ignore conflicts entirely. Using ShareLaTeX as an editor on a third-party git repository seems potentially awesome, but fraught with unfortunate security implications, as well as having to deal with merge conflicts on pull.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sing…

With few exceptions, most of the papers and presentations I've written get finished, tagged, archives, and never touched again. Sometimes I'll start a new presentation and take some material from a previous one, but I still typically do so as a new document. Given a model like that (which seems fairly standard in research), unlimited projects wouldn't really affect me much, since I can just delete projects I've finis…

You are right about people just moving projects in and out. Another option is to follow Cloud9's lead and have public projects for free and private available to premium. There are other things to limit like number of collaborators however its quite important to me personally to let as many people use this as possible. People do spend a lot of time on the site which might make adds an interesting alternative, but I would rather not muddy up the site with them. Any ideas are very welcome.

I feel people on HN/you are a small percentage of people who use latex and git in that way. I think most latex users backup policy is copying and pasting folders. Im not against the idea, what I really don't want is to deal with merge conflicts and people emailing me asking for git help it is likely I will offer a pull only service one day.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#47
I am a graduate student in a math-heavy field, so I thought you might be interested in some feedback. Just yesterday, I was embedding LaTex-derived images into an HTML email in order to collaborate, and I thought: this is just so stupid. Your service definitely fills a need in the research community. I love it. What is the envisioned freemium model? A problem I can see is that very few users would need more than the service you are already offering.

Re: ShareLaTeX

#50

I am a graduate student in a math-heavy field, so I thought you might be interested in some feedback. Just yesterday, I was embedding LaTex-derived images into an HTML email in order to collaborate, and I thought: this is just so stupid. Your service definitely fills a need in the research community. I love it. What is the envisioned freemium model? A problem I can see is that very few users would need more than the…

That is a problem tbh. At the moment my number 1 objective isn't to make money but we will see what the service costs me to run. Ideas for things for premium

- unlimited private projects / free accounts only have public projects like cloud9 - multiple compilers - unlimited collaborators per project - background compile looking for errors - git pull access

any other ideas are welcome.

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