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Show HN: Paperman – LaTeX editor with a Markdown feel

120 points by patricklorio 12y ago

beggi 12y ago
I'd say it's Markdown editor with limited LaTeX support but whatever. It's very cool.
thesumofall 12y ago
Nice demo. Hopefully the time will come when we will finally have a proper Latex editor that is easy to use and has an editor that makes it a joy to write with (think of iA Writer)
sigvef 12y ago
This is the same approach we're using at Wikipendium[1] for math-heavy article editing - Markdown with inline LaTeX math segments edited in a CodeMirror editor. It's cool to see others tackling the same problems in similar ways. We use Mathjax[2] for rendering LaTeX client side, but have run into some performance issues as the number of math segments increase on a single page. Paperman seems to be using something called MathQuill[3], has anyone here tried using it on large amounts of LaTeX math? KaTeX[4] is another possible alternative, and certainly the best I've tried in terms of performance, although it's still a little lacking in terms of symbol support. [1]: https://www.wikipendium.no/ https://www.wikipendium.no/ [2]: http://www.mathjax.org/ http://www.mathjax.org/ [3]: http://mathquill.com/ http://mathquill.com/ [4]: http://khan.github.io/KaTeX/ http://khan.github.io/KaTeX/
- laughinghan 12y ago
  Whenever there are too many equations rendered with MathQuill in the Desmos Graphing Calculator (http://desmos.com http://desmos.com), there are definite performance issues, but we're working on them! Definitely hoping to borrow some tricks from the very impressive KaTeX. Full Disclosure: I have worked for Desmos, and I'm still the creator and maintainer for MathQuill.
jbranchaud 12y ago
The tagline is misleading. This is just a markdown editor with something like MathJax dropped in to do LaTeX-like equation rendering. Nevertheless, the live-editing and download PDF features are pretty cool. Nice work!
zobzu 12y ago
i would call it a markdown with formulas :)
beerbajay 12y ago
Good idea, as latex editing can be incredibly slow, but the math support failed on my first test case: $$A = \sum_{n=-\infty}^{+\infty} f(x)$$
- Argorak 12y ago
  Can you elaborate? Most editors have SyncTeX (http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX) support and most viewers can handle that. You can pretty easily build on every change. Also, when the document becomes long, you can split it in multiple parts that only get rebuilt if they change. That's a sane way of organizing things anyways. I never had any performance probs.
- patricklorio 12y ago
  Damn, I tried your case and didn't work. I'll have to do some investigating.
Dorian-Marie 12y ago
I love it, I always thing LaTeX documents are the best looking PDF out there, but I write Markdown files because that's so much easier.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  It's not any easier. You are just more used to Markdown and I'm assuming more practiced in it. I'm a lot faster in LaTeX than Markdown because I use LaTeX every day but only touch Markdown about once a month.
wall_words 12y ago
If you want to generate LaTeX from Markdown, you can use Pandoc. Pandoc has various extensions to regular Markdown (including inline math, tables, etc.), so this gives you some flexibility when producing more complicated types of documents. In fact, Pandoc converts from Markdown to LaTeX to PDF when you choose PDF as the output format.
- Terretta 12y ago
  Love Pandoc. Recommend it highly for trans-format needs. Have also found that Texts > Pandoc > (whatever) works very well for non-techies -- think Texts (a "Markdown word processor") needs more love: http://www.texts.io/ http://www.texts.io/
  - giancarlostoro 12y ago
    Texts says it's Cross-Platform, and even has a (misleading) picture of Tux in the same page, yet no Linux version whatsoever?
atmosx 12y ago
Is there any editor that can produce that? Can I add custom latex extensions (e.g. for chemistry)?
yiyus 12y ago
I wrote a kind of markdown to latex script to help me writing my thesis, based in previous versions of md2html.awk. It had some more features than Paperman, such as ((footnotes)), [[bib references]] and [(references to labels)]. It also supported several heading levels, an abstract at the beginning, and even had some support for images and tables. It was never publicly released because, since it was for my personal use, required a serious amount of work to make it usable for more people and better (or at least some) documentation. Anyway, if somebody is interested, I have no problem sharing it.
- misnome 12y ago
  Have you had a look at pandoc? It sounds like something a bit similar (for future reference).
  - jhallenworld 12y ago
    Pandoc does look cool- I will have to try it. I wonder which input format is the most useful (has the best balance of features and ease of use) for it. For example, can I use markdown if I need references? I wrote a preprocessor for plain TeX for chip documentation. You type 'make view' in your documentation source directory to convert text into pdf and view it with acrobat. It was interesting to write this to see how to make a full "style" for TeX. The input is somewhat like markdown in that all ASCII characters print as is except \. Use \\ to print \, otherwise it's TeX: "see table \ref{tag} on page \pageref{tag}." It supports math in that you can calculate derived table entries: |Position |Size | |\{D+DR} |\{3} | |\{D+DR} |\{22} | |\{D+DR} |\{2} | |\{0} |\{5} | 'D' means get the value from the cell below. 'DR' means get the value from the cell down and to the right. Also you can assign to and use variables in any order \{a*2} prints 20 because later I set \{a=10}. https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/doc/nicetex https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/doc/nice...
  - aaren 12y ago
    pandoc can do footnotes `[^1]` and citations `@citekey` but not internal references (like \ref{fig:blag} in latex). This is a problem for academic writing. I'm determined to write my thesis in markdown and recently wrote a pandoc filter that implements internal references using `#fig:blah`, with an `\autoref` like implementation. It works for figures, sections and equations and for html and latex output. https://github.com/aaren/pandoc-reference-filter https://github.com/aaren/pandoc-reference-filter
m_mueller 12y ago
Here's what I'd need as a minimum to make productive use of this: * numbered list * download LaTeX What I'd consider paying for: * a nice table editor - IMO this is the only case where it would make sense to divert from the text-input-only approach. * Load LaTeX templates, have all of the common packages supported, so that I could just write papers online. * Integration with DropBox and/or Google Drive
- patricklorio 12y ago
  This is great. I'll try and get these features implemented.
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    Nice little project btw. - Online Latex is IMO a not yet solved problem, however others have a big head start and I imagine the whole thing gets complex very quickly - especially considering LaTex build times. If you want to offer the full functionality with all packages and everything, your service basically becomes a PaaS and you'll have to charge for access. Yet this is something that quite a few people could be interested in, since getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today. The problem with the business model is that it's really hard to try to charge money to academia, especially for things that are basically non-essential, even if they improve productivity. Btw. if you still want to go that route, I'd look into Docker. Basically you can give every paying user an isolated container where he's running his jobs. This has quite a few advantages: - more secure, since processes are isolated. - easily scalable, especially with their hipache router in front of it. Each process sees the same port internally, Docker manages the mapping from global ports to local ones, hipache manages failover / load balancing. - easy to separate into base functionality / pro packages for your business model - have a base image and an extended one with all the packages.
    - jimhefferon 12y ago
      > getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today People often say that. I find that assertion puzzling. I use LaTeX for hours everyday, so I think I exercise a lot of the functionality, but to install I just follow the brief directions on the TeX Live site (I don't use MiKTeX but I understand it to also install smoothly). Could I ask what part of the installation gives trouble?
mandalar12 12y ago
Nice project. Are the source available ? It would be nice to use but I'd rather host/use it locally. Besides I don't know which font (Symbola?) you use in the .pdf but it appears ugly (part of the 'o' is missing and it is overall not too easy to read) on my laptop running Ubuntu 14.10.
mostelato 12y ago
I use something identical to this: https://stackedit.io/ https://stackedit.io/
- patricklorio 12y ago
  I used that too, however the delay between writing something and seeing the preview render really bugged me.
- michaelmior 12y ago
  Isn't StackEdit a Markdown editor? It also doesn't seem like it has any kind of equation support.
sampo 12y ago
There is something wrong with all the o letters in the pdf that I downloaded.
- patricklorio 12y ago
  I'm using wkhtmltopdf to convert the html to a pdf in the backend. I'll have to look into this. Thanks.
jvdh 12y ago
If you want authors to actually write (scientific) papers in this editor you'll need a lot more: * including figures, with captions * tabels, with captions * sections * Something like the \ref{} command to refer to tables, figures, sections. * Citations
misnome 12y ago
I tried a "\begin{equation}" pair to get a numbered equation and nothing happened. I would say "Markdown editor with latex inline equations" instead of calling this a latex editor - the most basic latex syntax doesn't seem to work! (also: Isn't $$ an out-of-line equation, rather than a \displaystyle-sized inline)
NaNaN 12y ago
Seems like a linkbait. There is not anything new to me. It's just a Markdown variant editor with a LaTeX feel.
vanna 12y ago
http://markx.herokuapp.com http://markx.herokuapp.com :)
chatmasta 12y ago
I started using Latex with editors like this (sharelatex I think), but eventually, when my advisor said "latex is source code," I came to the realization that I should be writing in my text editor. Now I do all latex writing in sublime or vim and have a build script to compile to Pdf and open it in Preview on the left side of my screen. Save, build, review. Just as fast as an online editor, no lockin, and a native feeling.
grayclhn 12y ago
Emacs orgmode is an exceptional LaTeX editor with a markdown feel. Citations, numbered/aligned equations, tables, footnotes, etc.
mhartl 12y ago
Those interested in a tool that lets you use your text editor with an auto-refreshed HTML view should check out Softcover (http://softcover.io/ http://softcover.io/), which among other things is the build system used by the Ruby on Rails Tutorial.

120 points by patricklorio 12y ago

beggi 12y ago

I'd say it's Markdown editor with limited LaTeX support but whatever. It's very cool.

Nice demo. Hopefully the time will come when we will finally have a proper Latex editor that is easy to use and has an editor that makes it a joy to write with (think of iA Writer)

sigvef 12y ago

This is the same approach we're using at Wikipendium[1] for math-heavy article editing - Markdown with inline LaTeX math segments edited in a CodeMirror editor. It's cool to see others tackling the same problems in similar ways. We use Mathjax[2] for rendering LaTeX client side, but have run into some performance issues as the number of math segments increase on a single page. Paperman seems to be using something called MathQuill[3], has anyone here tried using it on large amounts of LaTeX math? KaTeX[4] is another possible alternative, and certainly the best I've tried in terms of performance, although it's still a little lacking in terms of symbol support. [1]: https://www.wikipendium.no/ https://www.wikipendium.no/ [2]: http://www.mathjax.org/ http://www.mathjax.org/ [3]: http://mathquill.com/ http://mathquill.com/ [4]: http://khan.github.io/KaTeX/ http://khan.github.io/KaTeX/

laughinghan 12y ago
Whenever there are too many equations rendered with MathQuill in the Desmos Graphing Calculator (http://desmos.com http://desmos.com), there are definite performance issues, but we're working on them! Definitely hoping to borrow some tricks from the very impressive KaTeX. Full Disclosure: I have worked for Desmos, and I'm still the creator and maintainer for MathQuill.

jbranchaud 12y ago

The tagline is misleading. This is just a markdown editor with something like MathJax dropped in to do LaTeX-like equation rendering. Nevertheless, the live-editing and download PDF features are pretty cool. Nice work!

zobzu 12y ago

i would call it a markdown with formulas :)

beerbajay 12y ago

Good idea, as latex editing can be incredibly slow, but the math support failed on my first test case: $$A = \sum_{n=-\infty}^{+\infty} f(x)$$

Argorak 12y ago
Can you elaborate? Most editors have SyncTeX (http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX) support and most viewers can handle that. You can pretty easily build on every change. Also, when the document becomes long, you can split it in multiple parts that only get rebuilt if they change. That's a sane way of organizing things anyways. I never had any performance probs.
patricklorio 12y ago
Damn, I tried your case and didn't work. I'll have to do some investigating.

Dorian-Marie 12y ago

I love it, I always thing LaTeX documents are the best looking PDF out there, but I write Markdown files because that's so much easier.

sjtrny 12y ago
It's not any easier. You are just more used to Markdown and I'm assuming more practiced in it. I'm a lot faster in LaTeX than Markdown because I use LaTeX every day but only touch Markdown about once a month.

wall_words 12y ago

If you want to generate LaTeX from Markdown, you can use Pandoc. Pandoc has various extensions to regular Markdown (including inline math, tables, etc.), so this gives you some flexibility when producing more complicated types of documents. In fact, Pandoc converts from Markdown to LaTeX to PDF when you choose PDF as the output format.

Terretta 12y ago
Love Pandoc. Recommend it highly for trans-format needs. Have also found that Texts > Pandoc > (whatever) works very well for non-techies -- think Texts (a "Markdown word processor") needs more love: http://www.texts.io/ http://www.texts.io/
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Texts says it's Cross-Platform, and even has a (misleading) picture of Tux in the same page, yet no Linux version whatsoever?

atmosx 12y ago

Is there any editor that can produce that? Can I add custom latex extensions (e.g. for chemistry)?

yiyus 12y ago

I wrote a kind of markdown to latex script to help me writing my thesis, based in previous versions of md2html.awk. It had some more features than Paperman, such as ((footnotes)), [[bib references]] and [(references to labels)]. It also supported several heading levels, an abstract at the beginning, and even had some support for images and tables. It was never publicly released because, since it was for my personal use, required a serious amount of work to make it usable for more people and better (or at least some) documentation. Anyway, if somebody is interested, I have no problem sharing it.

misnome 12y ago
Have you had a look at pandoc? It sounds like something a bit similar (for future reference).
- jhallenworld 12y ago
  Pandoc does look cool- I will have to try it. I wonder which input format is the most useful (has the best balance of features and ease of use) for it. For example, can I use markdown if I need references? I wrote a preprocessor for plain TeX for chip documentation. You type 'make view' in your documentation source directory to convert text into pdf and view it with acrobat. It was interesting to write this to see how to make a full "style" for TeX. The input is somewhat like markdown in that all ASCII characters print as is except \. Use \\ to print \, otherwise it's TeX: "see table \ref{tag} on page \pageref{tag}." It supports math in that you can calculate derived table entries: |Position |Size | |\{D+DR} |\{3} | |\{D+DR} |\{22} | |\{D+DR} |\{2} | |\{0} |\{5} | 'D' means get the value from the cell below. 'DR' means get the value from the cell down and to the right. Also you can assign to and use variables in any order \{a*2} prints 20 because later I set \{a=10}. https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/doc/nicetex https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/doc/nice...
- aaren 12y ago
  pandoc can do footnotes `[^1]` and citations `@citekey` but not internal references (like \ref{fig:blag} in latex). This is a problem for academic writing. I'm determined to write my thesis in markdown and recently wrote a pandoc filter that implements internal references using `#fig:blah`, with an `\autoref` like implementation. It works for figures, sections and equations and for html and latex output. https://github.com/aaren/pandoc-reference-filter https://github.com/aaren/pandoc-reference-filter

m_mueller 12y ago

Here's what I'd need as a minimum to make productive use of this: * numbered list * download LaTeX What I'd consider paying for: * a nice table editor - IMO this is the only case where it would make sense to divert from the text-input-only approach. * Load LaTeX templates, have all of the common packages supported, so that I could just write papers online. * Integration with DropBox and/or Google Drive

patricklorio 12y ago
This is great. I'll try and get these features implemented.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  Nice little project btw. - Online Latex is IMO a not yet solved problem, however others have a big head start and I imagine the whole thing gets complex very quickly - especially considering LaTex build times. If you want to offer the full functionality with all packages and everything, your service basically becomes a PaaS and you'll have to charge for access. Yet this is something that quite a few people could be interested in, since getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today. The problem with the business model is that it's really hard to try to charge money to academia, especially for things that are basically non-essential, even if they improve productivity. Btw. if you still want to go that route, I'd look into Docker. Basically you can give every paying user an isolated container where he's running his jobs. This has quite a few advantages: - more secure, since processes are isolated. - easily scalable, especially with their hipache router in front of it. Each process sees the same port internally, Docker manages the mapping from global ports to local ones, hipache manages failover / load balancing. - easy to separate into base functionality / pro packages for your business model - have a base image and an extended one with all the packages.
  - jimhefferon 12y ago
    > getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today People often say that. I find that assertion puzzling. I use LaTeX for hours everyday, so I think I exercise a lot of the functionality, but to install I just follow the brief directions on the TeX Live site (I don't use MiKTeX but I understand it to also install smoothly). Could I ask what part of the installation gives trouble?

mandalar12 12y ago

Nice project. Are the source available ? It would be nice to use but I'd rather host/use it locally. Besides I don't know which font (Symbola?) you use in the .pdf but it appears ugly (part of the 'o' is missing and it is overall not too easy to read) on my laptop running Ubuntu 14.10.

mostelato 12y ago

I use something identical to this: https://stackedit.io/ https://stackedit.io/

patricklorio 12y ago
I used that too, however the delay between writing something and seeing the preview render really bugged me.
michaelmior 12y ago
Isn't StackEdit a Markdown editor? It also doesn't seem like it has any kind of equation support.

sampo 12y ago

There is something wrong with all the o letters in the pdf that I downloaded.

patricklorio 12y ago
I'm using wkhtmltopdf to convert the html to a pdf in the backend. I'll have to look into this. Thanks.

jvdh 12y ago

If you want authors to actually write (scientific) papers in this editor you'll need a lot more: * including figures, with captions * tabels, with captions * sections * Something like the \ref{} command to refer to tables, figures, sections. * Citations

misnome 12y ago

I tried a "\begin{equation}" pair to get a numbered equation and nothing happened. I would say "Markdown editor with latex inline equations" instead of calling this a latex editor - the most basic latex syntax doesn't seem to work! (also: Isn't $$ an out-of-line equation, rather than a \displaystyle-sized inline)

NaNaN 12y ago

Seems like a linkbait. There is not anything new to me. It's just a Markdown variant editor with a LaTeX feel.

vanna 12y ago

http://markx.herokuapp.com http://markx.herokuapp.com :)

chatmasta 12y ago

I started using Latex with editors like this (sharelatex I think), but eventually, when my advisor said "latex is source code," I came to the realization that I should be writing in my text editor. Now I do all latex writing in sublime or vim and have a build script to compile to Pdf and open it in Preview on the left side of my screen. Save, build, review. Just as fast as an online editor, no lockin, and a native feeling.

grayclhn 12y ago

Emacs orgmode is an exceptional LaTeX editor with a markdown feel. Citations, numbered/aligned equations, tables, footnotes, etc.

mhartl 12y ago

Those interested in a tool that lets you use your text editor with an auto-refreshed HTML view should check out Softcover (http://softcover.io/ http://softcover.io/), which among other things is the build system used by the Ruby on Rails Tutorial.