Show HN: Notepag.es - Markdown/LaTeX editor for quick technical documents. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Notepag.es - Markdown/LaTeX editor for quick technical documents.

notepag.es

100 pointsvmind20 comments

Hi, this is a resubmission now that I have matured the code and released the source. I've also added support for mobile clients using a jQuery Mobile served page (slight bugs from its alpha status, but much more usable than a browser targetted page).

The source is available on github here: https://github.com/fivesixty/notepages

Might I suggest a slide-out panel with common Markdown/etc. symbols? My experience was

1) Click the link in the article, intro page didn't load (during the brief watcher script error)

2) Navigate directly to Notepag.es, get a blank doc

3) ... Crap, I don't remember any Markdown aside from italics, the app is pointless without that knowledge.

Naturally, I could open up separate tabs with that info, but keeping it self-contained helps the lazy users. If not a more fleshed-out guide, at least putting relevant links on the page would be nice -- going back to the intro page for that info is not intuitive.

Seeing a little bit of Markdown in action when editing the Introduction page is nice. You could stand to draw more attention to that -- my first thought when presented with a blank screen is "Well what do I do now?" whereas a page that has some pointers/suggestions/samples gets me engaged and helps me see the added value.

Thanks for the suggestion! I just added a cheatsheet for common markdown in a panel on the left when in edit mode, not a comprehensive list (and I'll add some common LaTeX stuff in a bit) but better than knowing nothing.

Gitit -- http://gitit.net does most of this except the WYSIWYG part and simple layout.

And you can host gitit on your own servers.

Gitit is based on pandoc, which allows you to covert to and from rst, markdown, latex, .. and a dozen more formats.

Another neat project is Gollum as released by Github which gives you a nice simple layout to a git-back wiki (https://github.com/github/gollum ). Development seems a little slow though, with seemingly important pull requests like this one stuck with no official response:

https://github.com/github/gollum/pull/121

I've also just noticed that notepag.es is open source, and so you can host it on your server (but need to set up node.js and MongoDB).

Finally, the concept is very similar to the now defunct infogami (which I believe was funded by YC and then merged with reddit?), by Aaron Swartz.

This is really cool. You might want to add support for something like Typeset to get even closer to the TeX experience: http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/

I like this. Have been searching for such a tool for a while.

My only suggestion is to make the page editing textarea more wide. The default width of 500px is too narrow for me.

Thanks for the suggestion, I increased the textarea width to be the same as the page width.

* Edit: this interacts a bit weirdly with changing between narrowscreen/widescreen. I'll work on making the textarea width more flexible.

UI comments:

I missed the "edit" button completely - I'm on 1680 width screen and centralised content is common, normally nothing of value is pushed to the edge, least of all the T-R edge. Support links placed at the screen edge tend to be placed mid-page and be coloured to contrast with the background. I'd also visited the page when this was on HN before and obviously totally missed the edit links then too ...

The slide-in markup notes are good but lack consistency with the rest of the UI. I wonder about using a left-alignment placing the buttons at the top-centre [edit|save][cancel][help|syntax] with some color or tone applied to make them stand out a bit more; then put the markup on the right as now and use the centre margin for the markup hints (which could then drop down from the top and stay in position until closed). For bonus points use a centred non-edit view and slide the markup from under the output view rather than just setting it to appear (basically adding some easing with jquery or whatever).

Just thoughts really.

How would you compare Notepag.es to org-mode? I wouldn't say org-mode is simple, but it has a lot more functionality! (yes, LaTeX/code fragments/similar Markdown/...)

Particularly awesome is the table editing feature that makes maintaining plain ASCII tables very very easy!

http://orgmode.org/

This looks cool. Some random comments:

* I'd need it to work offline. Not everyone does, though.

* Cutting over to a two-column layout at 1260px: don't lots of people have 1200px? It'd be neat if you could accomodate them.

* Is the prominent "edit" link at the latexdemo page supposed to work? It didn't for me.

What browser are you using? The edit button should work on every page (although saving may require a password).

I'll add offline to my list of features to work on, it hopefully shouldn't be difficult, although MathJax lazily loads files it needs from the CDN, which could be tricky.

EDIT: I just pushed a patch related to fieldSelection in Firefox 4.

It now works for me; FF4, indeed. I'm not sure if it was a glitch or you fixed it, but...

Don't work too hard on my behalf! But yes, I'd like offline support.

Nice, this is what I've been looking for for a while now.

Would it be possible to add an Export to PDF without relying on a local PDF distiller?

Because of how the markup is generated, it's not too nice to get a 1:1 pdf. I have been looking at PhantomJS (headless webkit) which can render out to a pdf, but it seems not to like something about the libraries used, as the fonts and math are not displayed. Hopefully that can be fixed.

I've been looking for a place to print my editor notes. This is perfect, thanks.

LaTeX math does not work at all on an iPad.

I've tested it on the iPad simulator and real iPad, and it worked (I think the real iPad was iOS 4.2). Does the LaTeX markup just get highlighted grey? If so, is there any error message in the bottom left from MathJax?

EDIT: Ah I found the problem, following internal links is conflicting with jQuery Mobile. Thanks for the report.

This is fixed now.

Its down

Up again, watcher script managed to get the wrong port number.

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