4 ms·

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 evenin

by beck5 15y 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 https://github.com/coreh/nide > S3 > Linode > loggy.com

JoshTriplett 15y 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/ 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 http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
- beck5 15y 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!
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    ACE seems like the best choice; I didn't realize it didn't do remote cursor tracking. Definitely not worth going out of your way for. As for showing the cursor in the PDF preview, even just doing that for the user's own cursor would work quite well. I definitely wouldn't suggest that you allow people to install new packages globally. However, TeX supports personal LaTeX paths, so users could have their own path with whatever extra packages they needed. (Also, if you ever decide to provide paid-account-only features, that seems like a prime candidate.) TeXLive definitely covers most needs. Beamer and TikZ represent the biggest things I regularly want that TeXLive doesn't include, and would want to install to a non-project-specific location (since they both have big piles of interacting packages). Other bits, like conference and journal styles, usually come as a single .sty or .cls file that I could easily enough just drop in my project if necessary. One more thought: I desperately want this to integrate with git, since I version-control almost all of my LaTeX documents.
    - beck5 15y ago
      Having individual user paths with style files and other packages is something I have thought about. I think for my premium account I will probably only offer unlimited accounts and perhaps continuions compiling behind the scenes looking for errors. It is quite important to me to offer a full service for free. on git: I want to add some sort of versioning, my current plan is to do a nice friendly wrapper around a single branch on git. This could then be pulled from for peoples peace of mind but probably not pushed to. My thinking is git is hard, I use it all day as a dev and I am still googling how to do things, if you are a mathematician yes you have the ability to learn it but you shouldn't have to and probably can't be bothered to.
hdevalence2 15y 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.
- JadeNB 15y 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.)
  - hdevalence2 15y ago
    It sort of depends. For the blackboard bold, it's not really much difference between doing it in the editor and doing it as TeX macros. I used to do them in TeX, but after I started doing other things in the editor I switched them for no particular reason outside of consistency. Also, expansions for words like function, holomorphic, 'the following are equivalent', 'if and only if', etc., are problematic to do as TeX macros, because of issues around spacing, and because it's simply more readable. For the others, it is really about the keystrokes -- one has to be able to type really fast to keep up in a lecture or a talk, and then once you've optimized for speed, why not type that quickly all the time?
- beck5 15y 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/ http://ace.ajax.org/ I am an avid vim user and I would also love more powerful bindings.

by beck5 15y ago

JoshTriplett 15y 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/ 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 http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

beck5 15y 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!
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  ACE seems like the best choice; I didn't realize it didn't do remote cursor tracking. Definitely not worth going out of your way for. As for showing the cursor in the PDF preview, even just doing that for the user's own cursor would work quite well. I definitely wouldn't suggest that you allow people to install new packages globally. However, TeX supports personal LaTeX paths, so users could have their own path with whatever extra packages they needed. (Also, if you ever decide to provide paid-account-only features, that seems like a prime candidate.) TeXLive definitely covers most needs. Beamer and TikZ represent the biggest things I regularly want that TeXLive doesn't include, and would want to install to a non-project-specific location (since they both have big piles of interacting packages). Other bits, like conference and journal styles, usually come as a single .sty or .cls file that I could easily enough just drop in my project if necessary. One more thought: I desperately want this to integrate with git, since I version-control almost all of my LaTeX documents.
  - beck5 15y ago
    Having individual user paths with style files and other packages is something I have thought about. I think for my premium account I will probably only offer unlimited accounts and perhaps continuions compiling behind the scenes looking for errors. It is quite important to me to offer a full service for free. on git: I want to add some sort of versioning, my current plan is to do a nice friendly wrapper around a single branch on git. This could then be pulled from for peoples peace of mind but probably not pushed to. My thinking is git is hard, I use it all day as a dev and I am still googling how to do things, if you are a mathematician yes you have the ability to learn it but you shouldn't have to and probably can't be bothered to.

hdevalence2 15y 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.

JadeNB 15y 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.)
- hdevalence2 15y ago
  It sort of depends. For the blackboard bold, it's not really much difference between doing it in the editor and doing it as TeX macros. I used to do them in TeX, but after I started doing other things in the editor I switched them for no particular reason outside of consistency. Also, expansions for words like function, holomorphic, 'the following are equivalent', 'if and only if', etc., are problematic to do as TeX macros, because of issues around spacing, and because it's simply more readable. For the others, it is really about the keystrokes -- one has to be able to type really fast to keep up in a lecture or a talk, and then once you've optimized for speed, why not type that quickly all the time?
beck5 15y 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/ http://ace.ajax.org/ I am an avid vim user and I would also love more powerful bindings.