LaTeX Workflow on iPad • Hacker News Board

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#11

Post by gdsimoes » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

wanderfowl wrote: post #6

d3ron wrote: post #2

Well, I just use Overleaf to do my LaTeX work on my iPad.

Overleaf's fine, but lack of offline editing, and more crucially, trusting my main working copy to live only on somebody else's computer, is a bit of a non-starter for me. Plus, call me an idealist, but it feels like a huge step back when a device requires a paid web service to do something that's completely free on a real computer. I don't know that "pay somebody else" should be hailed as the solution to "good softw…

You made a good point about offline editing but Overleaf's main reason for existing is precisely TeX software not being so good.

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#12

Post by LolWolf » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #10

I don't see TeXPad mentioned anywhere. An iOS LaTeX environment, featured here a few years ago: https://www.texpad.com/blog/latex-ported-to-ipad https://www.texpad.com/ios

Just adding to this: TeXPad is what I use on both my laptop (when working on a big screen, though I mostly use Vim when working from battery) and my iPad mini 5 (+ a little bluetooth keyboard) on flights and before meetings.

Honestly, using that + iCloud syncing (+ Git, on my laptop) has been great: all of the changes I do sync across all of my devices, as do the PDFs, which I can easily bring up in meetings, while also having the plus side of git (diffs, general VCS niceness) once I get back to my computer and commit the changes to the remote repo.

Of course, unlike the OP, I'm not aiming to completely replace my laptop... I'm trying instead to augment my workflow to not carry my laptop to meetings, while waiting for people, etc.

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#13

Post by occamschainsaw » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:26 AM UTC

I have another (albeit more expensive) workflow. I use texpad[0] on my Mac and iPad, with the files stored in Dropbox and iCloud. Works like a charm and almost no overhead setting up.

[0] https://www.texpad.com

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#14

Post by valec » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:31 AM UTC

tuananh wrote: post #8

wanderfowl wrote: post #4

This is great to see, but also really frustrating. I see Apple pushing to make iPadOS feel more 'real computer', but these sorts of basic Unixy workflows still feel very hacky, particularly when it comes time to save things to the 'File system', as it were. I look forward to a day when I can someday actually use things like XeLaTeX and Pandoc on an iPad to accomplish my actual work, but for now, I'm finding myself ed…

The file manager improves but not by a lot. I think iPadOS is only usable as an actual computer when they finally make the Terminal app on iPad and a much better File app

in the meantime you can take matters into your own hands and jailbreak if possible

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#15

Post by goerz » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:59 AM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #10

I don't see TeXPad mentioned anywhere. An iOS LaTeX environment, featured here a few years ago: https://www.texpad.com/blog/latex-ported-to-ipad https://www.texpad.com/ios

+1 on Texpad. It also integrates extremely well with File Providers. You can clone a repo of your TeX project on Working Copy, and then link the entire checkout folder in Texpad. Then, just edit and compile in Texpad, and switch back to Working Copy to commit and push the changes.

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#16

Post by goerz » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 5:01 AM UTC

wanderfowl wrote: post #6

d3ron wrote: post #2

Well, I just use Overleaf to do my LaTeX work on my iPad.

Overleaf's fine, but lack of offline editing, and more crucially, trusting my main working copy to live only on somebody else's computer, is a bit of a non-starter for me. Plus, call me an idealist, but it feels like a huge step back when a device requires a paid web service to do something that's completely free on a real computer. I don't know that "pay somebody else" should be hailed as the solution to "good softw…

Overleaf has excellent offline support through its git interface (or Dropbox, if you prefer).

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#17

Post by goerz » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

d3ron wrote: post #2

Well, I just use Overleaf to do my LaTeX work on my iPad.

The Overleaf website is a bit painful to use on an iPad. Hopefully, this will change with the "desktop-grade" Safari announced for iOS 13. Maybe someone already running the beta could test this?

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#18

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

tuananh wrote: post #8

wanderfowl wrote: post #4

This is great to see, but also really frustrating. I see Apple pushing to make iPadOS feel more 'real computer', but these sorts of basic Unixy workflows still feel very hacky, particularly when it comes time to save things to the 'File system', as it were. I look forward to a day when I can someday actually use things like XeLaTeX and Pandoc on an iPad to accomplish my actual work, but for now, I'm finding myself ed…

The file manager improves but not by a lot. I think iPadOS is only usable as an actual computer when they finally make the Terminal app on iPad and a much better File app

So all Macs up to OS X weren't usable it seems.

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#19

Post by goerz » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

I find Texpad to work great in principle, although I get frustrated by any text editor that is not vim. If you have the ability to sideload (that is, you have a developer account), there is a fork of iVim (https://github.com/holzschu/iVim) that supports running TeXLive locally on the iPad. I wrote up some notes on how to make this work some time ago: https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/editing-latex-on-the-ipad-wit...

When I don't need offline editing, another workflow I've used is to do the editing on my linux server: edit via Blink/tmux/vim on the left, and see the compilation result on the right via Screens/vncserver/evince (with auto-reloading).

Re: LaTeX Workflow on iPad

#20

Post by legulere » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 5:42 AM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #9

wanderfowl wrote: post #4

This is great to see, but also really frustrating. I see Apple pushing to make iPadOS feel more 'real computer', but these sorts of basic Unixy workflows still feel very hacky, particularly when it comes time to save things to the 'File system', as it were. I look forward to a day when I can someday actually use things like XeLaTeX and Pandoc on an iPad to accomplish my actual work, but for now, I'm finding myself ed…

They could very well steal the WSL idea from Microsoft and make something similar. Currently there is iSH which runs certain Linux utilities unmodified, but I'd love to see first-party support.

A shell based on [WASI] would be a pretty cool option to provide

[WASI]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI