Fwd: ShareLaTeX is now open source!

[Joe Corneli]

May be of interest.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Henry Oswald <te...@sharelatex.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 12:32 PM
Subject: ShareLaTeX is now open source!
To: Joseph <holtze...@gmail.com>

Hi Joseph,

We're pleased to announce that ShareLaTeX is now open source, and you can grab the code on Github! ShareLaTeX is a web-based real-time collaborative LaTeX editor, and you can now run your own local version where you can host, edit, share and compile your LaTeX documents. We're still 100% focused on running the hosted version at http://www.sharelatex.com, but we want to be more flexible in how you can use ShareLaTeX, and give something back to our wonderful community.

We're starting by open-sourcing the core parts of ShareLaTeX, including the editor, the project and document storage systems, and the backend LaTeX compiler that we use. This is only the beginning of our open-source journey though, and we will be open sourcing much more soon. (We still need to review our back-end code and write documentation for the other parts.)

Motivation

Our main motivation for ShareLaTeX has always been to improve the efficiency of scientists and students around the world. Open sourcing our code base is a natural way to make sure that we can help as many people as possible.

As a small team, we're constantly receiving feature requests that we'd love to implement but don't have the time. We've also had a lot of offers from willing volunteers who we've had to turn away because we didn't have a framework for people to contribute. We hope that by open-sourcing ShareLaTeX we can empower our brilliant community to help improve ShareLaTeX in the ways that you want, without having to wait for the two of us to work down our todo list.

A lot of people have asked to host ShareLaTeX internally due to company guidelines or data privacy concerns. We don't have the resources to support licensed installs at the moment, but we also hate having to say no. With an open-source version of ShareLaTeX, now anyone who wants to run it locally can.

We are still continuing to work on ShareLaTeX full time, and we expect that the time we have to work on new features will only increase in the coming year. (We are starting to look for a front end developer/designer to join our distributed team. If that sounds interesting then please get in touch at te...@sharelatex.com.)

Contributing

If you run into any problems with downloading and setting up ShareLaTeX, please let us know on our issue page.

ShareLaTeX is written in CoffeeScript (and occasionally JavaScript), and our back-end runs on Node.js. Regardless of your experience, we would love to help you get to know the ShareLaTeX code base, and help you contribute your first patch. The code can be found on Github, and an overview of all open issues can be found here. We've got some issues marked as 'good for beginners', but don't let that constrain you! We also have an open chat room for discussing development. Please drop in if you have any questions, or just say hi.

There are also ways to help that aren't all about coding. The whole site could do with the caring touch of a designer, or if you speak a language other than English, then you could help to translate ShareLaTeX. There is LaTeX documentation that needs improving, and we're always keen for bug reports from anyone using the site.

If you would like to discuss this news please head over to our announcement blog post.

Regards,
Henry and James
ShareLaTeX Co-founders

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[Deyan Ginev]

Hi Joe,

This is extremely cool news! My first order of business the moment I get some free time is to integrate a LaTeXML backend for their editor.

I would be extremely happy to see Planetary start interplaying with ShareLaTeX in a meaningful way, since they have a lot of things done right for the user experience.

Exciting news!
Deyan

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[Constantin Jucovschi]

Hi Deyan,

I was thinking of integrating it with Sally and Sally with Latexml (which is partially done). Lets speak about it Monday.

Constantin

---

From: Deyan Ginev
Sent: ‎2/‎22/‎2014 12:54 PM
To: planetma...@googlegroups.com; planet...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [Planetary] Re: Fwd: ShareLaTeX is now open source!

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[Joe Corneli]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 11:54 AM, Deyan Ginev <d.g...@jacobs-university.de> wrote:

 

This is extremely cool news! My first order of business the moment I get some free time is to integrate a LaTeXML backend for their editor.

Maybe this will be a good "spark" for the real-time rendering dreams I've been talking about.  The one complaint I've heard about ShareLaTeX is that it's too slow to be usable, so people (e.g. my boss) prefers to work on a local laptop.   But if we had real-time line-by-line rendering, then this would (in general) be faster than running pdflatex locally...

Joe

[Deyan Ginev]

Hi Joe, Constantin,

If we're talking LaTeXML as the backend, that's further away than it sounds - line-by-line rendering requires some sort of "streaming API" with the LaTeXML server, which in turn requires LaTeXML to be pausable and the web service to have "conversion sessions", so that an editor can re-enter a conversion pipeline from where it left off when the next line of input becomes available. (Also LaTeXML, is even slower than TeX when you run it "classically").

These are all exciting new features to consider for LaTeXML 0.9! (and I would like to contribute to realizing them). A second part to enhancing the ShareLaTeX experience could be "LaTeXML Introspection" that I brainstormed about on the LaTeXML list in January (http://lists.jacobs-university.de/pipermail/project-latexml/2014-January/001598.html). But having a mature frontend platform that allows me to reap immediate results of new backend features is really something wonderful and motivating!

@Constantin: Sally integration also sounds amazing, I'd love to see how that works out. In parallel to that effort, I am thinking of switching the showcase editor at http://latexml.mathweb.org/editor to use ShareLaTeX, if I manage to get the hang of that quickly.

All in all, building on ShareLaTeX should be a strong boost in demonstrating LaTeXML's qualities for web editing, and hopefully would also lead to Planetary enhancements.

Greetings,
Deyan

[Deyan Ginev]

The things you discover while you go through their (ShareLaTeX's)
current GitHub issues...

Apparently there is a port of pdftex to JavaScript now! *shocked* :
https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js/

How was this miracle performed? You get TeX's WEB code compiled to C,
then use the compiled LLVM bytecode to move things to JavaScript, via
another remarkable tool called "emscripten":
https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

The ShareLaTeX developers seemed approving of the approach, their only
criticism being that the resulting texlive.js was too slow for their
purposes.

That's another crazy idea to add to my stack (or any other enthusiast's
stack) - compile LaTeXML down to C (via http://www.perl-compiler.org/)
then in turn compile that to JavaScript, solving all the little annoying
issues in the process.

Who knows, it might be crazy enough to work :>

Deyan