Online collaborative LaTeX editor

[beck5]

Founder of http://www.ShareLaTeX.com here, the guys at writelatex have done a great job of making a new clear home page since last time they were on HackerNews (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385300) the example presentation and no sign in required is a really great touch as it helps quickly bring down the bar for those new to LaTeX.

The online LaTeX editor is not an easy problem to solve, compiling massive projects (hundreds of megs) elastically with several different compilers is not something you can crack in a weekend hence why I merge with http://www.scribtex.com.

Good luck to writelatex!

[StevenXC]

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.

[Mizza]

ShareLaTeX superfan here - glad to see you taking the new competition in stride! :)

Competition in a space is good for both of you - I can't imagine that many people will use offline LaTeX editors in the near future because of you guys.

[sweettea]

Does scribtex do latex compilation as a service? (I emailed you guys about this at some point, and you said you had no plans to do this yourself, but how do ya'll work with scribtex?)

[JohnHammersley]

Thanks for the comments beck5 - good luck to you guys too - as you say, lots of challenges but we keep making progress.

[mohamedmansour]

Would be really nice if there was intellisense! Great project though!

[at12]

both WriteLatex and ScribTex use codemirror, and ShareLatex uses ace, which editor do you plan to use after merging?

[stared]

The is also http://www.scribtex.com/ (unfortunately, going down, but was nice, also supporting Git access), https://www.sharelatex.com/.

And for short LaTeX text, there is http://mathb.in/.

Also, http://www.scigit.com/ looks promising (not working yet, though).

See also: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/27549/simultaneous-co...

[beck5]

Don't worry we are working hard to get all the functionality of ScribTeX fully incorporated into ShareLaTeX (git push & pull). We also have no long term plans on turning off scribtex while people still use it, but the focus is sharelatex.

[StevenXC]

ScribTeX is going down? What happened?

[jdleesmiller]

Founder here...

Great to see this on HN! Feedback much appreciated. Happy to answer questions...

[Beltiras]

Have you considered the popular front-end languages like Markdown, org-mode or any of the plethora of formats that have translators to LaTeX?

[songgao]

Looks neat! Is there possibility to add vim key binding, including search with '/'?

Also Git versioning would be awesome!

[pseut]

I 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 bibtex files?

[jdleesmiller]

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!

[bnegreve]

Wow, it even works with tikz! If it becomes popular, I bet you'll need some CPUs.

[JohnHammersley]

tikz is a great package! Re the CPUs - we're working on some neat ways to get round this :-)

[fox91]

It'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?

[jdleesmiller]

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! :)

[gibbonsd1]

Is it possible to include class files such as ieee.cls? http://mocha-java.uccs.edu/ieee/

[jdleesmiller]

Yep, you can upload .cls files using the files menu.

[mgualt]

This seems to work well -- I imagine I would use it if I were using a temporary computer, an ipad, or some such thing. What would be nice is if I could integrate it with dropbox or similar services, essentially use it to edit and compile files in my dropbox library. Also it would be good to use a standard editor with config files that could be saved to customize the environment.

[JohnHammersley]

Thanks for the comments - glad you liked it! We're working on the offline integration and user customisation features, they're in the pipeline.

[joshuagross]

Co-founder of http://www.SpanDeX.io here, it's cool to see so much excitement around web-based LaTeX editing. As Henry mentioned, scaling sites like this is quite challenging as LaTeX wasn't really built for performance or scaling, but it's still more pleasant than running on your own machine ;) Best of luck to everyone!

[fab13n]

Real-time rendering is done pretty fast and nicely by whizzytex (sudo apt-get install whizzytex), if you don't need the collaborative features and are comfortable with emacs.

This being said, doing it in a web client sounds like no small technical achievement!

[JohnHammersley]

Thanks - whizzytex is a good package for real-time rendering. What we're trying to do with writelatex.com is help users get into LaTeX by removing some of the traditional barriers (needing to install, compile, etc), plus making it easy for existing users to work on the go and from any comp.

Hope you like the site! :-)

[sonier]

This 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.

[rmk2]

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]: It might however be necessary to redefine one of the shortcuts for either flyspell or autocompletion, since they both use the same keys by default.

[JohnHammersley]

Thanks sonier :-) auto-complete is on our development list, I agree it makes things easier once you're used to it!

[JohnHammersley]

Thanks to all for the feedback - massive spike in traffic, and over 100 users signed up in the couple of hours since we pushed the site update :-)

More to come soon, and you can follow us @writelatex for the latest.

[stoodder]

This is awesome! I'd also like to share one of my local Wisconsin startups tackling the same problem: http://spandex.io/

[rcoh]

The images in the right pane are blurry for me -- I guess they're getting stretched out on my monitor. Could you use vector graphics instead of JPGs?

[jdleesmiller]

Yes, that's on our TODO list. Thanks for the feedback!

[Derbasti]

Even works on my iPad. Color me extremely impressed!

[jdleesmiller]

Founder here... Just pushed an update so you an sign up and manage your docs. Enjoy!

[JohnHammersley]

This is not the relaxing weekend I had planned! But yes, user accounts now available, plus a short getting started guide to help new users. As ever, all feedback appreciated

[glomph]

Seems very slow.

[JohnHammersley]

Hi glomph - the other writeLaTeX founder here - we were preparing for an update this weekend, weren't anticipating being posted on HN again! Should be running faster shortly.

[jdleesmiller]

We're bringing up some more capacity now...

[mjcohenw]

How well does this work from a Chromebook?

[jdleesmiller]

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!