ShareLaTeX

https://www.sharelatex.com/

by ot • 14 years ago

154 62 14 years ago

This is a legit startup idea. I can see my professors, research advisors, and myself using this for sure. Collaborative research documentation is a great idea. I hope others will see what I see, and use your service.

Awesome job BTW.

beck526• 14 years ago

Thank you very much, this is quite surreal to see it on HN getting good feedback!

th• 14 years ago

LaTeX Lab <http://docs.latexlab.org/>; is similar but Share LaTeX seems to have a much cleaner interface.

beck526• 14 years ago

LaTeX lab is a direct copy of google documents. I am also incorrect with www.scribtex.com who have another service. Scribex are going strong but latexlab is not being worked on anymore. sharelatex is the only service which offers the ability to work in real time which is the way I see latex collaboration working.

xtacy• 14 years ago

Does it have integration with Dropbox or some other file sharing service? That, IMHO, would be a killer feature!

beck526• 14 years ago

Unfortunately no, that brings in a world of Complexity which Im not planning on dealing with. www.scribtex.com offers a git based interface for offline work which may suit.

madiator• 14 years ago

Just few days ago I was saying that I wish Google docs could handle latex. Now this looks perfect! I will be sharing this with my advisor and other students and see whether we can use it.

stonerri• 14 years ago

LateX Lab was/is exactly that: http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/

A demo is up and running at http://docs.latexlab.org/

* not affiliated with the project in anyway, just remember using it awhile back.

beck526• 14 years ago

Latex lab development seemed to have stopped over a year ago before they implemented real time collaberation, if it had continued I would have not have started sharelatex.

gammarator• 14 years ago

This could be very useful! One potential challenge is there may not be a huge range of installed packages.

beck526• 14 years ago

At the moment it is just a full installation of tex-live 2011 on ubuntu, if something is missing just do some feedback and I will install it within a few (waking) hours.

zzleeper• 14 years ago

Looks amazing. Compiles fast, supports packages, and the error logs are much better than what I use.

That said, it would be nice to be able to download the files with one click, sync with dropbox, and maybe have support for versions or diffs?

beck526• 14 years ago

You can download the source files with maybe 2 clicks? (settings -> download zip).

There is no version control at the moment. I am working on how to implement this and diffs in a user friendly way soon. Basically git is not the answer for collaborative LaTeX in my option, a different more dynamic and simpler way is needed which I am working on.

JadeNB2• 14 years ago

> Basically git is not the answer for collaborative LaTeX in my option, a different more dynamic and simpler way is needed which I am working on.

This sounds very interesting. Could you elaborate at all, particularly on what 'more dynamic' means?

beck526• 14 years ago

Hi creator here, just got in from a few beers to see on HN which is amazing to see! I've only been coding for about 20+ months or so and this has been my evening/weekend project for the past few months, its a very new site, only out for about 5 weeks now. There are still lots of things to improve but the feedback has been amazing.

I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment, deep down I want to offer free a service which helps people collaborate on important work. Ideally with premium accounts subsidising a free but fully functional accounts. i.e. help people work together first, make a living second.

few buzzwords for people: > MongoDB/mongolab, > 100% CoffeeScript, > Node.js, > Now.js/socket.io, > Twitter bootstrap, stole css for menu bar from nide https://github.com/coreh/nide > S3 > Linode > loggy.com

JoshTriplett5• 14 years ago

> I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment

So you'll have half as much traffic in 100.5 days? :)

More seriously, this looks awesome. I do all almost all of my writing in LaTeX, including papers, presentations, and random other documents. I've tried to collaborate on LaTeX documents before, but unlike many other types of text documents, the collaboration didn't work very well: the editors that could do collaboration didn't integrate with rapid compilation and previewing, and the editors that do rapid compilation and previewing don't do collaboration.

Have you considered using PDF.js to display the PDF in real-time in the browser next to the LaTeX document? Put that together with something like SyncTeX, and you could show your (or everyone's) current cursor position in the rendered document in real-time. Various tricks also exist to render LaTeX documents more quickly to allow for real-time previewing, such as those used in WhizzyTeX http://cristal.inria.fr/whizzytex/ .

Integration between the BibTeX bits and some form of online reference tracking would make a lot of sense: hit one bookmarklet or browser plugin button on a paper you want to reference, and end up with a new reference in your .bib file.

The biggest question I immediately have: how well does this handle documents that need random packages you don't already have in your TeX installation? From Beamer and TikZ to conference and journal styles to random obscure formatting packages, I don't want to find out in a crunch that I can't easily use any package I need. Do you have any compatibility issues with random TeX and LaTeX packages, perhaps due to the need to run them in a secure server environment? Do I have to add all the individual packages into my project, or can I have them as common elements across my projects? Similarly, can I share my own .bib files and packages across projects?

On that note, what about images and arbitrary data files I might need to include, such as from \includegraphics or

What TeX implementation do you use behind the scenes? TeXLive, I hope?

How do I know what versions you use? What happens when you upgrade? TeX itself might keep backward compatibility forever, but random LaTeX packages don't always maintain that property.

First-impression question: why do you ask for my first and last name, rather than just an email address and password? Do you want it to fill in \author{} automatically? Please say up front what you need it for. Either way, never ask for "first name" and "last name", just ask for "full name", which will work for more people. http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

beck526• 14 years ago

massive get out clause, its 3am in London and I have been drinking

I have looked into pdf.js and semi implemented it however it was only really worth it for firefox users, other browsers generally had a better experience natively, not that I am ruling it out forever but at the time I went for keeping it simple.

Seeing others cursors would be great. I am using the ace editor and that does not natively suport more than once cursor atm, if I had more time I may implement it myself but to be honest it is not going to happen in the very short term.

behind the scenes it is just a fully instance of tex-live 2011 which should cover 95% of needs. For other packaged which are available I am hoping people request them for the moment and I install them, for obvious reasons I am wary of allowing people the ability to install global packages on my server.

On first name and last name, you are right not really needed, same goes for email confirmation. I have been planning on killing those for a while but just hasn't happened!

hdevalence22• 14 years ago

Hey, this is really great (and a strange coincidence -- this afternoon I was thinking about building something similar).

Something I'm wondering about: I currently use vim-latexsuite which has a bunch of expansion features. For instance, if you type '^^' it expands to '^{<++>}<++>', where the '<++>' are jump markers, and then 'jumps' into the first marker. So if I wanted to type e.g., 'e^{-x/2}', the keystrokes I'd use would be 'e ^ ^ - x / 2 CTRL-J'.

I'm not sure how you'd do the something similar, but the combination of jump markers and user-defined expansions (e.g., I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{<++>}{<++>}<++>' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}' ) saves an enormous amount of time writing TeX.

JadeNB2• 14 years ago

> I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{<++>}{<++>}<++>' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}'

Out of curiosity, why do all these in your editor rather than in TeX? For example, `\def\QQ{\mathbb Q}` would work just fine, and be only one more keystroke. (The third example could be made into a parametrised macro, but `\frac` is already such a macro, so I guess that you're really valuing the keystrokes.)

beck526• 14 years ago

Pleased to hear it wasn't a mad idea to build the site! I don't personally write the vim command and tbh they are just vi movement bindings which come along with the ace editor - http://ace.ajax.org/

I am an avid vim user and I would also love more powerful bindings.

tnicola• 14 years ago

Excellent. Now I no longer have to cart MikeTex Portable on my keychain. Since I work on multiple computers with files from my DB, this will be great. Thanks.

jpluscplusm2• 14 years ago

Great concept and nice looking implementation, Henry! I'd not remembered to check it out since you mentioned it in the pub the other (last?) week, but I'll definitely kick the tyres over the weekend :-)

beck526• 14 years ago

Ha ha, hello John! I have since left the land of ec2 and this is running happily on a small linode instance, found it much faster for my monry. Yes my db's are in a totally different datacenter to my server but I don' think the site is that slow.

£10 says it goes down in the next 6 hours.

jpluscplusm2• 14 years ago

Hah! I don't think I'll take that bet :-)

I'm bored this w/e, so do get in touch and let me know if I can lend a hand with some back-end systems tuning ... email, or via the phone number on m'webshite (also on devwiki, under "contact numbers" IIRC)

pbnjay2• 14 years ago

I'd really like to see a prominently linked privacy policy. Not that I'm particularly concerned with you stealing my work-in-progress, but just as an easy-to-see assurance that such things won't happen.

A really sweet potential feature request: dropbox integration. Then I could work on my dissertation from anywhere, and always have a few extra backups.

beck526• 14 years ago

Good point, security is vital to this (hence everything is https). I will be looking into this.

starwed• 14 years ago

I actually ended up writing my thesis using Eclipse with two plugins, one to support latex and one to support git, and that worked surprisingly well.

beck526• 14 years ago

Git is the best if you are working on LaTeX by yourself, I wrote my dissertation last summer using it extensively. However writing LaTeX is different from code for many reasons, for one if you write a new class in e.g. c# all other classes do not care about the implementation, just what can the put in and what do they get out. With LaTeX that doesn't work, you duplicate yourself and get the narrative in the wrong order, they are very different paradigms. I am planning on writing a blog post on this soon.

pbnjay2• 14 years ago

yeah I just use vim/git for everything.

I did write a makefile to do the monotonous stuff for me (create pdf, generate figures with graphviz, fetch bibtex from zotero, etc). one of those instances of procrastination instead of writing which i can at least justify.

evoxed2• 14 years ago

Nice! I can't tell if your site is just HN bombed or my internet is choking again (been going on alllll day).

Looking forward to giving it a spin!

beck526• 14 years ago

yep just wen down for about 2 mins. Back up now. getting on HN was not planned at all!

evoxed2• 14 years ago

Managed to load the homepage. I'll be digging through now, it looks great. Hot damn it even catches errors! :)

skystorm• 14 years ago

Great idea and I like what I'm seeing so far. I assume it's based on pdflatex, as opposed to latex + dvipdf / (dvips + ps2pdf) ?

FWIW, I just imported a document I'm working on to check things out. It gives a bunch of warnings (underfull \hbox) but other than that works fine on my system -- on your site, however, I can't get to the PDF, it keeps jumping to the Logs screen with the warnings...

beck526• 14 years ago

Yep its pdflatex, could you let me know which project that is so via the feedback form so I can investigate?

msutherl• 14 years ago

Hey, just tried it out with the IEEEtran template and it didn't work:

http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishin...

I did upload the class file and the document points to it explicitly.

You can check out the errors here: https://www.sharelatex.com/project/4f2cc71be369403e73004116 (awesome that I can do this!)

This is really great, I'm going to tell all of my academic friends/collaborators about it. This is a _huge_ improvement over version control (for non-geeks) or Dropbox sharing, not to mention email, which a shocking number of people seem to still use.

beck526• 14 years ago

I am still getting some styles ready on the site. It all got very popular a bit to early for me!

iz_mani• 14 years ago

Hey ,this awesome job. Interface is simple and looks fine.

gulbrandr• 14 years ago

Please open the "Accept Terms and Conditions" link on another tab/window. Thank you.

beck526• 14 years ago

On the todo list, thanks.

Estragon2• 14 years ago

How hard is it to securely sandbox untrusted latex code?

beck526• 14 years ago

this may be of interest, I've been chatting to the author today actually. https://db.usenix.org/events/leet10/tech/full_papers/Checkow...

The site is secure but can always do better.

Estragon2• 14 years ago

Wow, that makes it sound hard to do.

curiositydriven• 14 years ago

I am a graduate student in a math-heavy field, so I thought you might be interested in some feedback. Just yesterday, I was embedding LaTex-derived images into an HTML email in order to collaborate, and I thought: this is just so stupid. Your service definitely fills a need in the research community. I love it. What is the envisioned freemium model? A problem I can see is that very few users would need more than the service you are already offering.

beck526• 14 years ago

That is a problem tbh. At the moment my number 1 objective isn't to make money but we will see what the service costs me to run. Ideas for things for premium

- unlimited private projects / free accounts only have public projects like cloud9 - multiple compilers - unlimited collaborators per project - background compile looking for errors - git pull access

any other ideas are welcome.

estevez• 14 years ago

Sweave support? You could hand off to an EC2 instance and include n hours of computation time in tier x.

ovechtrick• 14 years ago

excellent, excellent, excellent. will absolutely be using this!

sio1• 14 years ago

brilliant, been waiting for something like this.

hacman• 14 years ago

If you were to offer an self-hosted version that I could install in my own datacenter, that'd be of serious interest to me (my company). Allowing anyone else to hosting the sort of documents that end up in latex (very sensitive research papers) is simply not an option, but collaboration among researchers would be very convenient on a platform like this if we could control it. Sure, lots of latex is university or public research that ends up getting published anyway, so security is not a concern. A lot of it, however, is industrial research labs where information security is of paramount importance. This seems to be an overlooked market among many people who just want to make web programs. I urge you to consider the possibility that you have many potential customers who are not interested in letting you host their data.

Very cool site, though. Google docs for latex is a very useful offering. Thanks!

beck526• 14 years ago

please get in contact hacman, i've not closed any doors yet. The code still needs lot of polish and work but I am defiantly interested.

ufuk• 14 years ago

Why does the Terms and Conditions document (https://www.sharelatex.com/termsAndConditions.html) refer to Automattic Inc.? Is that a leftover from a quick copy and paste?

ShareLaTeX

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