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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.
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?
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.