Just tested with some chinese characters, showed up as blank in the output pdf file. No support for languages other than english is not good.
ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#12Just tested with some chinese characters, showed up as blank in the output pdf file. No support for languages other than english is not good.
LaTeX doesn't support Unicode. You need XeLaTeX for that: http://i.imgur.com/Yx9x4.png (code is at http://paste.pocoo.org/show/295774/)
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#13That's just really nice. I used LaTeX for two theses and loved it. It was very freeing to just worry about content and not about layout. When I use Word, I constantly fiddle with styling and with Word's occasional bizarre behavior (delete a word and the next paragraph becomes bold... ?!). With LaTeX, I spent an hour up front defining styles and a few minutes toward the end adjusting styles, but otherwise just wrote c…
Wholeheartedly agree. Who doesn't like LaTeX? This makes it better because it saves me having to install a local copy of one of the absolutely humongous LaTeX packages (MacTeX was 1.6GB last time I looked), which, on my small SSD, is considerable. Also, I can now pump out LaTeX-perfect copy when I'm stuck using a dronebox with nothing but MSWord installed.
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#14Very cool. This is headed in the right direction.
I think there's a lot of room for improvement in LaTeX editors. For instance:
Suppose I'm reading a PDF compiled draft and spot an error in an equation. It would be fantastic if I could simply click on the equation and have a mini text box pop up with the relevant LaTeX code. After editing the LaTeX the PDF would seamlessly update.
Or suppose I see an embedded figure and want to change its dimensions. It would be great if I didn't have to guess, compile, check, guess, compile, check, guess, compile, check, etc. If I could see the result as I edit the code, or maybe even have a little GUI to click and drag to scale, that would save me tremendous amounts of time.
I would pay a monthly subscription to have a fast online version of that software.
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#15Just tested with some chinese characters, showed up as blank in the output pdf file. No support for languages other than english is not good.
LaTeX doesn't support Unicode. You need XeLaTeX for that: http://i.imgur.com/Yx9x4.png (code is at http://paste.pocoo.org/show/295774/ )
It's hackish, but you can do Unicode in LaTeX with the inputenc and ucs packages. If you do:
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{ucs}
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
LaTeX doesn't support Unicode. You need XeLaTeX for that: http://i.imgur.com/Yx9x4.png (code is at http://paste.pocoo.org/show/295774/ )
It's hackish, but you can do Unicode in LaTeX with the inputenc and ucs packages. If you do: \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} \usepackage{ucs} then the inputenc macro package does a first pass on the document, handing off all non-ASCII characters to ucs to replace them with LaTeX commands to generate the appropriate characters, if supported. So, ö gets replaced by \"{o}, א gets replaced with \hebalef, etc. Doesn't work f…
Huh, it worked for ö, but א gave me:
! Undefined control sequence.
\u-default-1488 #1->\hebalef
Package ucs Error: Unknown Unicode character 12371 = U+3053
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hackish, but you can do Unicode in LaTeX with the inputenc and ucs packages. If you do: \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} \usepackage{ucs} then the inputenc macro package does a first pass on the document, handing off all non-ASCII characters to ucs to replace them with LaTeX commands to generate the appropriate characters, if supported. So, ö gets replaced by \"{o}, א gets replaced with \hebalef, etc. Doesn't work f…
Huh, it worked for ö, but א gave me: ! Undefined control sequence. \u-default-1488 #1->\hebalef And the Japanese example above gave me: Package ucs Error: Unknown Unicode character 12371 = U+3053 Either way, there's not much of a point in using LaTeX when XeLaTeX is available, save for intercompatibility. So until sites like this one start moving to XeTeX/XeLaTeX, we'll still often be stuck without (true) Unicode.
Ah yeah, for things other than the built-in special characters (like umlauts), you also need all the relevant language-specific packages that actually implement the macro, a bit of additional fun. ;-) In the Hebrew case, you need the ivritex package for \hebalef to be defined.
But yeah, XeLaTeX makes that all much simpler. The LaTeX solution is mostly good if you're already using LaTeX for some reason, but need to include non-ASCII text from a limited range of languages (e.g. you're writing a Hebrew document, or an English document with a Greek literature quotation).
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#18That's just really nice. I used LaTeX for two theses and loved it. It was very freeing to just worry about content and not about layout. When I use Word, I constantly fiddle with styling and with Word's occasional bizarre behavior (delete a word and the next paragraph becomes bold... ?!). With LaTeX, I spent an hour up front defining styles and a few minutes toward the end adjusting styles, but otherwise just wrote c…
Google docs has a latex based equation editor http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-docs-has-equ...
Sweet! Now they just need a LaTex-based doc editor... ;)
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#19Latex compiling is precisely a kind of thing I'd do on _my machine_ than on a web service.
Who in this world knows Latex but doesn't have access to a machine to compile it into a pdf?
While I really like how well the site has been done, I have a hard time imagining how it would be a success, in the market.
Re: ScribTeX online LaTeX editor (with git interface)
#20Latex compiling is precisely a kind of thing I'd do on _my machine_ than on a web service. Who in this world knows Latex but doesn't have access to a machine to compile it into a pdf? While I really like how well the site has been done, I have a hard time imagining how it would be a success, in the market.
My brother is writing his thesis in Economics soon and we live at different ends of our country. I'm trying to convince him that Latex is the way to go and being able to do online help sessions would help a lot.
Besides, to someone who has only ever used WYSIWYG installing compilers and the like is really complicated.