Show HN: We've open-sourced our bootstrapped startup, ShareLaTeX

https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex

by jpallen • 12 years ago

276 79 12 years ago

jpallen12• 12 years ago

James from ShareLaTeX here. I'm hanging around all day today ready for the barrage of pull requests that we're about to receive(!) so feel free to ask me any questions.

mlevy• 12 years ago

No questions - just wanted to say thanks for a great product I really enjoy using!

infruset2• 12 years ago

Thank you for a great product. We have been using it in my university to take collective notes during winter schools, it's been incredibly helpful!

Basically, we are able to produce at the end of the conference a pdf with all the course notes, illustrations and links; it's like writing the book in real time.

subdane2• 12 years ago

Whoa hey! I've been looking for something like this! Do you have any examples online of your group-created notes?

gjuggler• 12 years ago

Really cool to see this! I'm sure the effort required to make it open source will pay off in fostering an active technical community. Given the target market I'm sure you have many highly skilled users who would love (at the very least) to fix their favorite bugs.

On a related note, recently at http://paperpile.com/ we've been thinking about ways to help our users connect their reference manager with web-based writing environments like ShareLaTeX. We've had some ideas about how to do this simply and cleanly, but I suppose now we could show you guys (via pull request) rather than tell now. :-)

jpallen12• 12 years ago

We'd love to start pushing forward on some reference manager integrations, so a pull request would be amazing! It might be best to have a quick chat about how to implement this. My email should be in my profile.

hootener5• 12 years ago

Great work, James. I think I'll fork this code and give it look-see.

I manage the dissertation/thesis template for my department on github. The assembly and dissemination of this template is a purely student-run effort. Typically the task of managing it gets passed to a new student when the previous manager graduates.

The problem I've found with managing it this way is that I'll invariably get a slew of emails from students throughout the semester wanting me to troubleshoot their LaTeX installs to make the template work. 99% of the time the problem is on their end, 1% of the time it results in something that actually improves the template somehow. It would be awesome if I could just point them to your service where a hosted (and guaranteed to work) version of the template resides.

Can I just shoot you a github link[1] to get it incorporated or is there some other process I should go through? (e.g., would you prefer me to send you a zip? I figure what's the point since it's already on github, but if you prefer that approach I can get you a zip)

[1] https://github.com/hootener/LaTeX-Vanderbilt-Dissertation-Fo...

jpallen12• 12 years ago

I've put this on our template todo list, thanks!

thearn42• 12 years ago

The assembly and dissemination of this template is a purely student-run effort. Typically the task of managing it gets passed to a new student when the previous manager graduates.

This was the unwritten ritual at my department when I was in graduate school too. But no one there really used VCS. Who knows how long that thing had been passed around and tweaked.

sauravt• 12 years ago

This is awesome, really appreciate you guys open sourcing this app.

jtreanor• 12 years ago

This is really great. Thank you! What made you decide to open source it?

jpallen12• 12 years ago

Basically, we wanted to! We've benefited hugely from open source projects ourselves, and have always enjoyed being part of the community surrounding them. It seems like the default state is to not be open source, but we realised that since we own and run the business behind ShareLaTeX, we had the freedom to play by our own rules. We also think it makes sense from a business point of view as well, since it will (hopefully) make us accessible to a wider audience, particularly onsite installations that we don't have the resources to support as a proprietary 'enterprise' system.

We've written a bit more about our motivations in our blog here as well: https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2014/02/21/sharelatex-is-now...

theallan• 12 years ago

I (and I suspect many others here) would be very interested to know what effect this will have on your turnover. I guess you will get some increased revenue as others have indicated in this thread, but also loose some for those who just fire up their own installation.

Presumably you won't really know until your try it, but do you have any data to support that it might increase your revenue (assuming of course that is a goal here - rather than just growth of the number of users of your software - I realise that the two can go hand-in-hand!).

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

Good luck, i'm actually curious about a follow up on what opensourcing the app did with your business in an analystic way.

(more visitors, more income, ...)

Could be a next HN thread ;)

Edit: the thread above mine didn't exist when i read the comments :P

adsche• 12 years ago

Awesome! I happened to stumble upon ShareLaTeX just a couple of days ago, when I needed a CV and had no LaTeX installation available due to my personal laptop being broken.

I found it easy to get started, fast and overall a pleasure to use. :)

primitivesuave• 12 years ago

You're doing a great thing by making your platform open source. Even though you make it incredibly easy to get set up with a well written readme, I'd much rather purchase this service because it's not expensive and I know I'm supporting good people that care about contributing to the open source community. Plus, your product is awesome.

beck52• 12 years ago

Thanks, we were a bit worried that people will stop using the site but we hope everyone is wise like yourself! I think overall the main people who will set up there own versions are those who want to work on a private network which is an group of people we have been unable to help so far.

jancborchardt• 12 years ago

Do you have a logo for the app? I would really like to add it to the directory at http://libreprojects.net :)

onli• 12 years ago

@beck5: Your post is dead. are you banned? Think you should contact a mod, this seems to be an error.

Sharelatex is really awesome. It works well and makes it so much easier to just start writing latex. And with the preview it is even more comfortable than my desktop workflow before, which is the best compliment I can make for a web-based UI.

So, great. I used sharelatex for some really important documents, and I plan to use it for quite some more. And having it opensourced makes it more future-proof, so thanks for that.

ivanca• 12 years ago

@beck5 is banned (?) but here is his answer:

Thanks, we were a bit worried that people will stop using the site but we hope everyone is wise like yourself! I think overall the main people who will set up there own versions are those who want to work on a private network which is an group of people we have been unable to help so far.

beejiu• 12 years ago

This is awesome. A group of us used this to write a project for University a couple of years ago. It certainly made collaboration a lot easier, without everyone learning how to use git, for example.

antonydenyer• 12 years ago

This is awesome

mrcactu5• 12 years ago

is there any consistent way to turn LaTeX into HTML?

jpallen12• 12 years ago

There isn't a perfect way that I'm aware of. In LaTeX, the commands end up translating to direct formatting commands that only make sense in a fixed layout document, so HTML conversion will be an approximation at best. I think Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) does a reasonable job though.

StevenXC• 12 years ago

It may not be quite what you want, but https://www.softcover.io/ is a platform which aims to let you write eBooks in Markdown/TeX and publish them to PDF/HTML and eBook formats.

leoedin• 12 years ago

Brilliant! I used ScribTex (which I believe has now merged into ShareLaTex) a few years ago for my dissertation and it was brilliant! So much easier than maintaining a local LaTeX installation, plus being computer agnostic when working on my disseration was a huge bonus.

jre• 12 years ago

This is awesome

kriro• 12 years ago

This looks excellent. I'll certainly try it for my next paper and will see if I can lobby our university to pay for the hosted version.

I'm assuming universities are what you are aiming for? I think you should focus on CSy departments.

Could also target conferences/journals i.e. allow them to offer access to the hosted version for people collaborating on a paper for that journal/conference.

From a business development POV, I think it would make sense to wade through university pages and collect departments that offer Latex-Templates to their students as potential contacts.

greglindahl• 12 years ago

Historically, TeX and LaTeX have had their best penetration in Math, Physics, and Astronomy departments. Many journals in these fields only accept papers in TeX, and have their own templates.

benjamta• 12 years ago

A fantastic move! I've been using ShareLaTeX for quite some time, it's a great service. This move to open source really shows you're pushing your product in the right direction. Thanks :)

kaybe• 12 years ago

Our method of choice is local latex installatons + git, but this certainly looks interesting. It might be a good alternative if a less tech-savy member joins the group since it looks as if it was better for teaching and assisting people.

cies• 12 years ago

I love the service! I've used it for several documents so far; with great success.

Thanks for opensourcing!

newsoundwave• 12 years ago

I've been using this for my Senior Design project's docs, and so far I have had no issues.

Thanks for open sourcing!

brickcap• 12 years ago

Share latex.....

Open source.....

I will just come out and say it. I had funny thoughts in my head when I read that.

The official site as well as the products looks well designed (love the idea of templates). Here is the clickable link

https://www.sharelatex.com/

jpallen12• 12 years ago

You're not the first (and I doubt you'll be the last) to think that we're some sort of social media site based around prophylactics :)

bookworm101• 12 years ago

Well, i have been working on something similar for a little while, what is the biggest challenge when getting started with this type of SAAS? what do you wish you knew when you were getting up and running? Would you recommend anyone to try out the same venture you guys have done? Is there some worry about what this might do to revenue? or was there already some evidence this would do nothing evil to your business model?

jpallen12• 12 years ago

Phew, lots of questions :). I've only really done this once (with ShareLaTeX), and it feels like a constant challenge in many ways. I think I'd have to try it a few more times with other products to understand which challenges are the important ones. So no big insight there, sorry.

I'd definitely recommend trying to start a business with monthly recurring revenue. It makes things quite stable and predictable, and watching it grow is like crack.

We're not that worried about this impacting our revenue. Most of our value that people pay for comes from being a hosted service.

onalark• 12 years ago

This is incredible news! Congratulations, and thanks so much for contributing back

yrochat• 12 years ago

Congratulations James & Henri! I'm very happy that my lab has been financially contributing to your work for nearly a year :-)

Anyway, I'm currently writing my thesis and I've had to stop using your product. The dropbox sync is lame (I know that the problem is on their side) and working on three different computers (usually two at the same time) is a problem. But in case of collective writing, then shareLaTeX is the most useful tool. Thank you for that and for your move!

jpallen12• 12 years ago

Thank you for your support! There is a danger of sounding like a broken record, but when it comes to Dropbox sync: We're working on it, I promise! :) Dropbox recently released a new API end point that allows for long polling which should allow us to do instant synchronisation both ways. It's on our todo list!

thearn42• 12 years ago

Thanks for open sourcing! Looks like a pretty great concept, best of luck to you guys.

cliveowen• 12 years ago

writeLatex.com offers a live preview and it's faster overall. I really hoped this would be a better alternative because I'm already a bit disappointed in writeLatex.com's performance.

An online version of Latex sure beats the hell out of setting up a local installation though.

jpallen12• 12 years ago

We'd love to hear any things you think we could improve. And of course a pull request would be amazing as well!

huherto• 12 years ago

Awsome! I almost want to learn LaTex. Perhaps this is the push I need.

einhverfr2• 12 years ago

It's really great to see perpetual interest in collaboration on LaTeX documents. I hope you have great success (not sure I have a use for it now but will keep you in mind if I ever do). I also expect to recommend it.

Unfortunately a lot of my own documents are really hard to handle with editors -- I tend to write very long documents split across multiple source documents in a tree for easy management. I wonder if there is room in an offering like this for something more like an online IDE rather than just a editor for a singular file.

jpallen12• 12 years ago

You can split your document into multiple files on ShareLaTeX too, just like you could on your own computer with LaTeX. There is still a lot that we'd like to add into our IDE, but providing an experience that compares with offline editing is an important priority for us.

einhverfr2• 12 years ago

That's very good news, indeed. Definitely will be using this on my next major LaTeX document project.

geekam• 12 years ago

Kudos! Having your source available and ability to peek into it gives me more confidence in your service and I'd rather use that. Thank you for doing this.

RA_Fisher2• 12 years ago

My wife started out with www.writelatex.com to write her dissertation. The auto-compilation really slows down once you get beyond 30 or so pages.

Also they don't have Git integration either, which was a deal breaker for my wife.

She's since moved to using RStudio locally + Git.

She says, "If you have Git integration, the auto-compilation feature would get me back from RStudio."

We've also thought about using Grunt to build our own auto-compilation feature.

pseut3• 12 years ago

latexmk has an auto-compilation feature

anonymouz• 12 years ago

Check out latexmk. With it's -pvc option it has continuous preview (=auto-compilation).

RA_Fisher2• 12 years ago

Thanks!

phireph0x• 12 years ago

I used ScribTex for my dissertation and have used ShareLaTeX for papers as well. Both were/are great services backed by a great team. Having experienced the pain in configuring and maintaining a local LaTeX installation in the past, it was a pleasure to have a web-based version that was backed by git.

I'm glad to read that the code behind ShareLaTeX is being released as open source!

blueblob• 12 years ago

Thank you so much! I wanted to use this initially but my advisor didn't agree with storing unpublished papers on another server than the localhost/our servers. As a result I was using flylatex[1] which is nice but not as mature as this. Now I can give this a try!

[1] https://github.com/alabid/flylatex

silveira• 12 years ago

I'm a big fan of ShareLaTex, I'm always showing it to friends. It was very useful for me during my studies. I'm extremely happy knowing it is now under the GPL Affero license.

shrikrishna• 12 years ago

I used your product to write my resume, and could finish it without having to learn latex top-to-bottom. Really an amazing product guys. Wish you all the best and hope you achieve great success!

grittathh• 12 years ago

Thank you for open-sourcing this! At the moment I'm using sharelatex to keep a version of all my equations "alive" since every time someone tries to resave my word documents, the equations become rendered to images.

Unfortunately for me, Latex hasn't gained traction in our department. I think the main barriers to entry, for our lab at least, are:

1) Local installation is more difficult than installing Word. Sharelatex and other cloud-latex solutions solve this.

2) Word's comment and review tracking system is more intuitive. If you're reading a document electronically and want to insert a comment or make an edit in word, you just do it right there. With latex, you can use synclatex to go back and forth but this extra step is actually a non-insignificant barrier. Also, with latex, is there a way to make and see comments in the pdf/preview but have the comment also live somewhere in the source, AND have the comments be editable in both places? I suspect the answer is yes, but I just haven't found the right tool?

I haven't unlocked the "history" feature in sharelatex but does it come close to this?

hootener5• 12 years ago

Word's comment and review tracking system is more intuitive.

This. The first person that makes a LaTeX comment and track changes system as intuitive as Word's can have all my money. No, the comment and todo LaTeX packages don't count. There's just too much resistance in getting someone to go through the LaTeX install process just to use packages in a syntax they don't want to take the time to learn.

alxndr2• 12 years ago

Could version control get you part way there?

jpallen12• 12 years ago

Our history system isn't great at the moment. We made the classic mistake of building a feature that doesn't really work for a lot of people. However, we understand want people want a lot better now and we're working on something that is very inspired/copied from the change tracking in Word. It's a very popular request!

pseut3• 12 years ago

Just tested this out with a 150 page document split across several folders; it compiled quickly and I really like the way you display the logs and warnings. Looks great! And I really appreciate your making it opensource.

Integrating this with github a la travis-ci would be great, obviously one would need to be able to make commits to the repository too; I'm not sure if it would be great enough that it would induce people to start paying for the service if they weren't already, though... although I'd sure like it.

I'm not sure what sort of use-cases you are seeing already, but this seems most useful to me personally for last-minute edits to coauthored papers & grant proposals right before submission. Nailing down the final version can be a real pain in the ass.

A few other minor observations:

* uploading a zip file didn't work, but I'm on an old version of RHEL and made the zip with Ark, so... who knows

* after accidentally drag and dropping a bunch of .bbl, .log, .toc (etc) files, I didn't see a way to delete more than one file at a time, or how to undo a file deletion.

* I also couldn't figure out how to move a file from a subdirectory to the top level directory

beck52• 12 years ago

we have spent a lot of time working on our compiler, it is good fast!

We currently have a internal jenkins ci server, we should make the build status available some how. Although we are militant that builds are always green.

The zip sounds unusual, it should work.... The drag and drop stuff is not great, we really need another person to join the team and spend some time on our front end (plug, remote welcome).

pseut3• 12 years ago

Oh, I meant that I want to link a github repo containing latex for a paper to sharelatex; I.e. You'd be Travis-ci for latex repos.

jordigh• 12 years ago

Ooh, neat, AGPL! Are you planning to sell exceptions?

imroot• 12 years ago

I'm really excited by this. I've been a big fan of ShareLaTeX and teach a LaTeX class at my local Hackerspace for EE/CE students at the Universities near Cincinnati and I always use ShareLaTeX in our class as an easy way of getting started without needing to install TeXLive on your system. This allows me to run our own version of the service at the Hackerspace -- nothing sucks more than trying to teach an online class when 25 Engineering-heavy students are using the 5M Down Internet connection...

stevejb• 12 years ago

This is fantastic! I am planning on showing this to my undergraduate students, because 1) it will help them be more professional in the long run, and 2) I am incredibly sick of trying to read their handwriting and inconsistent documents.

I am wondering, what would be the best way to have students create accounts and have their accounts be populated with templates for all of the homework assignments?

I am really excited by this announcement. I hope that it leads to even more success!

habosa• 12 years ago

This is great. ShareLatex is an excellent service and they are always improving. They're the only company I can think of that sends useful, interesting emails that are for my benefit and not just theirs. Keep up the good work!

xanth• 12 years ago

I have been meaning to use LayTeX for my assessment and now that my second year of university is rapidly approaching this product looks perfect. I would love to use this but github intergeneration is a must for collaboration. What is the time frame for git integration?

malnourish• 12 years ago

I use ShareLaTeX for all of my computer science and mathematics homework and I convinced many of my peers to as well. Thank you for the excellent product. When I saw the email in my inbox earlier today I was shocked, but I am glad that you have reached this decision.

avaku• 12 years ago

I love it!

Show HN: We've open-sourced our bootstrapped startup, ShareLaTeX

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