Two Interesting LaTeX Online Editors

One, a Google Docs app, LaTeX Lab (thanks to Daniel for pointing this out.) Another with https support Verbosus. I couldn’t get the later to compile and display in browser with FireFox, but did in Safari. Verbosus has an android app, but strangely no desktop version.
Recently I’ve been mostly using Dropbox for collaborations using LaTeX. Every once in a while there are conflicts in editing at the same time, but with only a few people this seems to work really well.

7 Replies to “Two Interesting LaTeX Online Editors”

  1. I had not seen Verbosus before, but it looks interesting. LaTeX Lab is currently the best-of-breed IMO.
    For LaTeX collaborations, I have been using the Mercurial revision control system and hosting the repositories on my shared hosting account. It works better than Dropbox because you have a merging process for when people edit the document at the same time. In fact, you can even do simultaneous edits deliberately, e.g. when two people want to work on different sections of the paper, and the merge will work automatically if there are no conflicts. Of course, it requires your collaborators to learn the system, but the small amount of pain is worth it for the benefits.

  2. And I suppose you’d have me write my papers in vim rather than Emacs as well?
    The war may seem lost at the moment, but I comfort myself in the knowledge that the small productivity advantage I gain by using Mercurial whilst the rest of science uses git will be beneficial to my career. In fact, because the same will happen to any scientist who decides to switch to Mercurial, the “degree of fertility” (in Chalmers sense) of Mercurial users is higher and they will eventually come to dominate science.

  3. Verbosus works fine in FireFox (at least on my PC 🙂 I guess the reason why there does not exist a desktop version of a browser based editor is that the whole idea behind it is to use it while being on the move and to store the projects on one place instead of several ones. So why need a desktop version at all?

  4. @devilseye
    Because one doesn’t always have the internet. For example I get a lot of work done while flying. So really what I need is not a desktop based version, but easy integration with my local filesystem (i.e. it should be synced with a local version a la dropbox).

  5. Mercurial + private Bitbucket.org repositories + LaTeX has been nice for collaborating. As long as you have fewer than 5 collaborators, it’s free. A reason to get those papers done faster!

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