VelNZ

9 ms·

1. 31.▲
   by VelNZ 5y ago

   Reminds me of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiments: "Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to g
2. 32.▲
   by VelNZ 5y ago

   I wonder if this is in response to a sudden surge in revenue following the previous announcement. I bought >$100 in Vita games and I'm sure many others started stocking up too. Whatever the reason, it's good news we have a year
3. 33.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   That's a really interesting workflow, thanks for sharing!
4. 34.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   Now I'm sorry for the slow reply! It started as individuals and academics, I was typesetting CVs and papers, but as time went on I have had more and more businesses as clients. Now it's about 80% businesses/institutions. I th
5. 35.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   It just feels wrong to perpetually owe many people with very little benefit for accepting that burden. I don't think there's much practical difference between forever and 2 years for a purchase like this, but for the business the
6. 36.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   I'm just trying to set explicit limits on liabilities. The alternative as I see it is to accept money to provide a service indefinitely, but have terms clauses that any purchased credits may be forfeited for any reason. Perhaps if that
7. 37.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   Hey! I must confess I haven't actually read those myself, although I did recently buy Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information", on which the Tufte class is based I believe. If you eventually get into typogr
8. 38.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   That's true, credits do obfuscate cost which is something I don't like about them. If a dollar balance is used and the majority of transactions do correspond to $1 spent = $1 balance, then that's intuitive (as you said) since
9. 39.▲
   by VelNZ 6y ago

   Word/Google Docs/Pages/Writer are what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors (WYSIWYG). Overleaf abstracts away the content from the presentation somewhat due to the nature of LaTeX, but it still effectively provides a real time vi
10. 40.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    I know one image is a bit cropped on the home page on mobile, but apart from that everything works as intended on my iPhone 11. I'm using Safari though. What bugs did you encounter?
11. 41.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    I'll be adding a demo, a few others also commented on that. Yes, essentially you can fill out HTML forms for defined variables in LaTeX templates and get back compiled PDFs.
12. 42.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    I really appreciate you trying it out and giving your feedback, thanks! The lack of a preview and wasted credits on mistakes is something I'd like to improve in the medium term. The way it is now, content is completely separated from p
13. 43.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    They're completely different products with completely different goals.
14. 44.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Thank you, noted.
15. 45.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    It's partly modeled on the ShutterStock pricing model, well, the on-demand part of it anyway. Glad it looks nifty though!
16. 46.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Yeah, a free tier is on the table, particularly if there's little paid take-up over the next few months. The only issue is free comes with support and feature requests, and I'm doing this solo for now. As you said though, low-leve
17. 47.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Pricing scheme will change, that's become obvious today! Well, I also offer a service to create LaTeX templates, but yes, I know that limits the market and that's ok. I'm not trying to take over the world, I just want a &quot
18. 48.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Thanks, my intention was actually to be as customer-friendly as possible. From my perspective, the customer can walk away whenever they want (they don't even need to unsubscribe), and they have choice for expiry based on their expected
19. 49.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Expiration because selling something that never expires is a permanent liability. My friend had the idea that I could make all credits expire in 2 years (for the liability issue) and simply discount the cost/credit for larger numbers p
20. 50.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Thanks, agreed, I'll work on a demo page that lets anyone create documents for a specific template using the same form as someone who is logged in. A gallery of templates like what you see when you log in is also on my TODO list.
21. 51.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    You're suggesting something similar to what Overleaf did: they're the most popular online LaTeX editor used by many institutions and are now open source. It's certainly worked for them! I'm not strictly opposed to the id
22. 52.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Thanks for the feedback! I tried to make it clear what the product does in the How It Works section at the top of the home page and a few simplified screenshots further down, but perhaps that's not visual enough. I personally like when
23. 53.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Hey, there's quite a few LaTeX enthusiasts on HN! Great question and observation! Currently, the platform doesn't handle external non-text assets at all. This is something I will definitely be incorporating in the future. You can
24. 54.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Noted, and I really appreciate the honesty. I'd love to hear your thoughts on alternative pricing models!
25. 55.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Thanks for the feedback! I answered a similar question in this thread with my reasoning for the pricing model, but it's really good to hear that I should probably change it from multiple people. Briefly, I wanted to discount sporadic b
26. 56.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Is using part of someone else's name a violation of trademark laws? I'm genuinely curious! I chose Creo because it means "to create" in Latin (I'm a sucker for Latin names), with docs obviously being short for docum
27. 57.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    It was certainly hard to choose the pricing model. I tried to explain it in the "Why Credits? Why Not Dollars or Subscriptions?" section here: https://www.creodocs.com/support?section=credits Ultimately, I don&#x2
28. 58.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    When I searched online for the name there were essentially zero results for it so I'm surprised it would infringe anything. I'm not sure how trademark law works so I'll look into this though, thanks!
29. 59.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Yes, I can see now that would be very useful going forward and I'll get on to it soon! Thanks!
30. 60.▲
    by VelNZ 6y ago

    Hi all, sole developer here! Creodocs has been over 6 years of work in my spare time and it's great to finally launch it! The idea for Creodocs came about after I launched https://LaTeXTemplates.com and https://L