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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."
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.
Most exciting thing I've seen all day! Right now I use a subversion repository to collaborate with my coauthors, but my advisor isn't very technical and can't seem to figure it out half the time. This is going to be much easier.
Try this.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm allergic to it, so I use sheepskin instead.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
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.
I loved using Latex when I was in school. I used it not only for dissertations, but also for assignments. But I can't find any use for it outside academia. At least not at my current job. Does anyone have any stories where they use Latex outside a university?
Talking with peers in the TeX world, I find that few professionals are writing in LaTeX directly anymore. LaTeX's typesetting abilities remain sexy, but it is far between to keep a document in a semantic markup like Docbook XML, transforming it to LaTeX via an XSL stylesheet only when one wants to produce final print output.
Writing a LaTeX document directly might be OK for students who do only one or two papers a year, or someone who needs to quickly get a math notation graphic. But if LaTeX is something you do regularly, far better to setup a workflow where it is just a stage transforming data kept in a more structured format.
You neglect to mention it costs 55 euros at its cheapest.
While there is certainly value in continuous as-you-type output rendering of LaTex, remember that the purpose of LaTeX is typesetting, not word processing. The value is that you describe to (La)TeX how you want things to be rendered and rely upon it doing the right thing, which it nearly always does, beautifully.
You can change something, restructure, re-order, re-design etc. and everything falls perfectly (usually) into place. This is not the case with the WYSIWYG word processing systems--the closest they get to this is the rather limited "styles" presets.
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{numiter.eps}
When I tried to upload the numiter.eps file, I am getting a message that it has an unsupported extension.
-Matyas
Thanks to Timothy for posting about writeLaTeX on here - I'm one of the developers and just got in from my Valentines day meal out to see the post! It's great to see the whole cloud-based LaTeX community taking off (as others have pointed out, there are lots of options out there for online LaTeX editing) - we've done a lot of work with the guys at LaTeX-Community.org and TeXample.net to allow all of their LaTeX examples to be opened in writeLaTeX with a single click for editing and sharing - we hope this is helping new and existing LaTeX users work together more effectively. Thanks for all the feedback - more to come from us soon, so we hope you like what we've done so far :-)
John
There is a pretty good looking editor for Latex called Bakoma. What I have never understood with latex is that it is hard to find an editor that does exactly what this website does. You type on the left and it appears on the right. But I want one step further. You also can edit on the right.
The problem with that is that for many graphical interactions there will be more than one interpretation, so a computer cannot know what you actually wanted to do: all it can see is the effect of you having done it. If you can solve that non-contiguity, you'll have a really nice, saleable product...
When I was in college and enamored with all things OSS I tried really hard to get into LaTeX. But it seems to me that as time progresses and our method of interacting with our computers via GUIs is more entrenched that it's kind of a dying notion. Of course, there are people who still use it (and will undoubtedly loudly criticize this post), but I would be willing to wager that it's dwindling.
Certainly not in my experience. On the contrary, what I see of LaTeX is growing. A lot of people who encountered it in college were poorly taught, poorly advised, and were given very poor documentation, and they assumed it was just for math/phys/eng geeks. But the quality of doc has improved massively, and the biggest growth area now is the Humanities, who have outgrown Word and are looking for something more controllable.
I do believe some people are working on that, but actually with the speed of today's machines you can compile most documents (even fairly large documents) in about 1-2 seconds tops, of course depending on your machine. On my notebook it is almost instantaneous for documents of 10 pages in length. Thus you can just put a view buffer (xdvi window) on auto refresh and have autosave set to 10 seconds with a compile hook and you get very good results, but with a lag that you might not find acceptable.
It might be good to ask the developers of the site to see what they do - they must have some sort of compiler tricks to handle all those concurrent demands.
But to be honest I like LaTeX and TeX exactly for the reason that it doesn't render the document all at once. To me, writing is a bit like composing music - you work away at the different sections, working from sentence to sentence, paragraph by paragraph as the thoughts flow according to their inner harmony, and only afterwards do you get the orchestra together to hear what it sounds like. In my opinion writing is more of an intellectual art rather than a visual one. Writing a paper or even a letter is a lot like programming and TeX appeals to this style of working by putting the structure around the text and actually 'compiling' the document for others to use. It is first put in your mind clearly and only after compiling is it for others, much like a composer writes his music down before anyone hears it. Some people like to see what they are doing, and for them programs like InDesign are better, as they can move the text around and see how it looks. InDesign is more for painters than composers.
Pick your tools according to your tastes. I don't think LaTeX ever had the ambition to be for the masses, only to be effective at what it does. The instant preview does have advantages, there is no doubt about that.