How well does this work from a Chromebook?
I'm afraid we don't have a Chromebook to test on. We do test on Chrome and Linux, though, so hopefully it works well.
Thanks!
Online collaborative LaTeX editor
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#62It's awesome. I love it!
One feature that would make it much much awesome would be an integration with Github. In our university we're trying to convince professors to release the latex source of the lecture notes on Github in order to receive issues or pull requests from students for typos or improvements. As most teachers don't know git it would be great if they could open files on writelatex from github and commit changes. I know that's quite hard to do but imho it could really improve the project.
p.s.: Is it open source? Will it ever be?
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#63It's awesome. I love it! One feature that would make it much much awesome would be an integration with Github. In our university we're trying to convince professors to release the latex source of the lecture notes on Github in order to receive issues or pull requests from students for typos or improvements. As most teachers don't know git it would be great if they could open files on writelatex from github and commit…
That's a great idea! Integration with github is on our TODO list, so hopefully we can help with that.
It's not open source, but we're looking at several ways of taking it forward, and that's one of them.
Thanks for the feedback! :)
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#64This is awesome! Great work. One must have for me is auto complete, I use LaTeXila and its hard to move away from auto complete. Spell checking would also be amazing, I have yet to find a good LaTeX IDE with spell check.
I have been using Emacs for quite a while now. It offers (via AucTeX/RefTeX) a brilliant solution for bibtex files, references, writing LaTeX, autocompletion etc. And if you use it in conjunction with either ispell or flyspell (on-the-fly spell-checking), you basically can use both at the same time.[1] However, this might be daunting, especially when this means starting and dealing with Emacs for the first time. [1]:…
I do the same. However, I also view the generated PDFs in Emacs and I set it up so that the PDF-in-Emacs will auto-reload whenever the PDF changes. And I agree, refTeX is amazing and awesome!
Lately, I even left pure LaTeX and migrated to org-mode and its LaTeX/PDF-export. That is a pretty brilliant combination, I must say.
Really among the many things Emacs does, LaTeX is one thing it does exceedingly well.
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#65Even works on my iPad. Color me extremely impressed!
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
No sign-in is nice as an option, but the fact that you can't sign in is a negative for me - I'd like to be able to manage multiple documents and projects within an account like on ScribTeX. Oh, and ShareLaTeX looks really good; thanks for sharing! I'm going to try it out now.
And as if by magic - you can now sign up to manage your docs on writelatex.com :-)
"Password is too short (minimum is 8 characters)" - this can lose you users. I don't want to invent yet another password just to try this out. So offer feedback on password strength, but let users decide on the secutity/convenience tradeoff. Better yet, use openid.
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give us any insight into how you plan on getting around this? It seems that publication quality typesetting and layout requires a certain level of CPU power, especially with complex graphics from TikZ/PGF and/or pstricks. Do you think your solutions will also help desktop users reduce the amount of CPU latex eats?
Good question. There's not much we can do at the LaTeX level, but writeLaTeX also has to send images of the pages back to browser, and we can improve that part of the process in quite a few ways.
Perhaps it would help to checkpoint the compilation periodically, keyed by hash of input consumed so far, so when adding a word on page 100 you don't have to load all packages and recompile 100 pages.
- One approach is fork() processes (the tricky part being flushing all I/O and redirecting to separate files). This only works in RAM, which means active users & machine affinity, but I suspect storing checkpoints for long is useless anyway.
- Another approach is TeX's builtin memory \dump mechanism. This generates a file, so you could reuse flexibly, stuff in memcached etc. And easier to set up. But looking at mylatex.ltx I get the impression you can't \dump from a process that loaded a dump, so you'd have to start from initial tex and re-parse all of latex :-(. Perhaps still a gain, at least keeping one dump after the preamble?
The other half of the problem is getting the page(s) you want quickly without waiting for the whole document to compile. My impression is pdflatex output is not valid PDF until it's done. Less of a problem for writelatex which already does separate images?
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as if by magic - you can now sign up to manage your docs on writelatex.com :-)
"Password is too short (minimum is 8 characters)" - this can lose you users. I don't want to invent yet another password just to try this out. So offer feedback on password strength, but let users decide on the secutity/convenience tradeoff. Better yet, use openid.
Thanks for the feedback - that's a very good point, as it to use openid.
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#69I can maybe see myself using this to tweak the last stages of a paper with a coauthor, but otherwise I can't imagine writing LaTeX without emacs keybindings (auctex, reftex, cdlatex, I'm leaving them all lowercase because I can't remember their idiosyncratic capitalization patterns). Case in point: in trying out your editor, I opened several new browser windows accidentally. So, is there a way to upload latex and bib…
My documents are full of :w, ct. and kkkjjkk --- we are working on adding keybindings. :) Yes, you can upload .tex and .bib files using the file menu. Thanks for the feedback!
Another thought (as I edit a document that a co-author wrote): if you could mimic tcilatex.tex (which Scientific Workplace throws into any document it touches) in a minimal, nonintrusive way, that would be fantastic. (tcilatex seems to be changing the 'gather' environment so that individual equations can no longer be numbered, for example.)
Re: Online collaborative LaTeX editor
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
My documents are full of :w, ct. and kkkjjkk --- we are working on adding keybindings. :) Yes, you can upload .tex and .bib files using the file menu. Thanks for the feedback!
Another thought (as I edit a document that a co-author wrote): if you could mimic tcilatex.tex (which Scientific Workplace throws into any document it touches) in a minimal, nonintrusive way, that would be fantastic. (tcilatex seems to be changing the 'gather' environment so that individual equations can no longer be numbered, for example.)
OK, we'll have a look. For now, you can upload tcilatex.tex to writeLaTeX and then \input{tcilatex.tex} after your \documentclass line. (Note: it seems to conflict with the amsmath package, however.)
Thanks!