Collaborative LaTeX Editor With Preview In Your Web Browser

Celarent Darii writes "Slashdot readers have undoubtedly heard of Google Docs and the many other online word processing solutions that run in the browser. However, as a long-time user of TeX and LaTeX, these solutions are not my favorite way of doing things. Wouldn't it be nice to TeX something in your browser? Well, look no further, there is now an online collaborative LaTeX editor with integrated rapid preview. Some fantastic features: quasi-instant preview, automatic versioning of source, easy collaboration and you can even upload files and pictures. Download your project later when you get home. Are you a TeX guru with some masterpieces? Might I suggest uploading them? For the beginner: you can start here."

Comments

Try LyX!

[gatzke]

LyX is a great free cross-platform document processor that uses LaTeX on the back end for export.

Not exactly WYSIWYG, but close enough. You export to PS or PDF as needed.

You can see basically what your equations look like while editing before you tex it. You can still use normal LaTeX commands too, but anyone with basic Word experience can jump right in.

I have used it for tons of things for over a decade now.

Re:Try LyX!

[WillAdams]

Agreed.

LyX is the most innovative opensource tool I've found yet, and one of the most effective --- the book manuscripts which I get which are submitted by LyX users are the cleanest, and most straight-forward, making for the most profitable typesetting jobs.

I really wish that there were a similar vector graphics tool --- I want something which is parametric and shows both drawn vector and under-lying code and which allows one to edit either representation.

Not just this one.

[Skidge]

While the summary makes it sound like this is some breakthrough idea, there are several similar sites out there:

https://www.sharelatex.com/

http://spandex.io/

And others, I'm sure. Is the submitter the owner of this particular version? The marketing speak is a bit over-the-top.

I used sharelatex for a group project last semester and it worked fine. Several features were added since then that make it likely I'll use it again.

Re:Bakoma costs

[Anonymous Coward]

You neglect to mention it costs 55 euros at its cheapest.

Re:Writing LaTeX directly is often unnecessary

[dgatwood]

LaTeX is basically a write-only language. Almost nothing else can read it except for other TeX variants. And TeX is pretty much a one-trick pony. It does only one thing particularly well: produce fixed-layout PostScript/PDF pages. Other output formats are bolted-on hacks. The problem is that PDF and PostScript are terrible for electronic publishing because of wide variations in screen size and resolution. All the fancy typesetting that looks great on an 8.5"x11" printed page looks lousy when you shrink the PDF down to fit on a seven inch Kindle or Nook screen. For this reason, most electronic publishing is done using HTML so that the reading devices can reflow the content freely to fit the screen. (This is arguably less true for textbooks, mind you.)

Although I'm told that the LaTeX path to HTML has improved a lot since I last tried to use it, you're still starting from source material that was designed for fixed-layout publishing, complete with formatting instructions, and trying to cram that into a non-fixed-layout publishing scheme. Such an inherently lossy transformation can never feasibly produce results that are as good as you would get if you started out with a proper separation between the formatting information and the content, e.g. authoring in DocBook XML and transforming it to HTML and LaTeX as post-processing steps.