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Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan).

And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything.

I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live at the intersection of CS and Education research, it is great how BibTeX will swap between APA and ACM styles easily, or how I can use a macro to create likert scale questions, for example. It probably takes the right kind of mindset, but I really liked the fact that my dissertation had a makefile (and was in source control, way back in the CVS days).

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They're also open source!

https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex

> Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing.

Agreed. Someone posted about it recently on here, and I've been using it ever since then for my research papers. Great website. My only suggestion for it would be that I wish collaborators could work on a particular LaTeX document without having to register.

I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty excessive.

While I've never looked into the guts of LaTeX package management, I've often thought that it could really, really use a tool that looks for dependencies and installs them (and only them) in an automated way, like Bundler for Ruby, npm, and similar systems.

Nope, tlmgr just isn't the same. :-)

> insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process

(Lol) Just type "apt install texlive-full" in Debian and you are done.

How do you deal with 'the cloud' not being under your control? Can you sync the documents from sharelatex to your local file system automatically?

They support syncing to and from Dropbox directly https://www.sharelatex.com/dropbox. So you can work offline, use your own editor etc.

[I work for ShareLaTeX]

You can also download your entire project as a zip archive, so you're not locked in to our platform in any way.

EDIT: also, ShareLatex is open source and fully self-hostable.

I didn't realize this, and it's absolutely incredible. You guys are great!

Thanks, not bad! I wish there was syncing without adding another cloud company to the mix though. Eg git or rsync.

I've used Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX) with git before. It's especially nice that people comfortable with git can edit locally, while still having the option of editing directly in the browser.

I find working in split-screen using something like sharelatex.com makes it difficult to actually read your PDF as you edit it. I keep the PDF open in a separate window, and compile from the command line.

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