[Tex/LaTex] Is LaTeX the best option

editors

I'm thinking about an open source project of an online editor focused on content, but based on HTML5 and other cutting edge technologies. I'm not a fan of LaTeX, but I have to agree that documents in TeX/LaTeX are really pleasing to the eye. Maybe I'm not a fan, because I've never known it good enough to feel confident, but I think there are many users like me. They like LaTeX documents but really don't want to write them themselves and here is my question.

As I've mentioned in first sentence. I'd like to try write something like an online editor focused on content – so this is the main LaTeX assumption as I've remembered from class. So in my concept this editor should make it easy to write text, but under the hood I'd like to have any good technology which will give flexibility for more advanced users. And I'd like to ask: is LaTeX a good language/format for documents?

Main goals:

online LaTeX compiler,
Web interface
- Easy for new users (click and write, focused on content, styles will be applied later during document creation)
- Advanced mode – raw LaTeX code
- collaboration
document will be LaTeX document, but this code will be hidden on first sight, if someone will go to advanced mode they can see this code, modify, download do whatever he wants – edit it like in a normal LaTeX/TeX editor

Are there any projects like this? I don't know everything so I'm asking here. Do you think it would be a good idea to use LaTeX as a base for documents? Or ex. document should be html document and styles should be done in some language like css. I think about LaTeX because I think it is really sophisticated and many things can be done using this. Things which aren't available in MS Word, Google Docs and others editors.

Right now my feelings about LaTeX are different. On first sight it's a really powerful technology, is useful when we are writing scientific articles, master thesis etc. but there are really small group of people who are using this. They are mostly students, scientists who are enthusiastic about good looking documents and don't care about raw text editors, many commands and not user-friendly interfaces.

If it's such a good technology why is there no good editor for LaTeX which is usable by normal users (I've intentionally skipped LyX, for me it's like prosthesis for normal users like me who want to use LaTeX, but don't want to learn the whole syntax.

So, are there better document formats, which could be used as base for such online editor focused on content?

Best Answer

Yeah I've thought about something similar as well, but instead of one output document, I'd go for one document per media. So I think it'd be a good idea to have the user input the document text in a human-friendly format such as Markdown, have your system transform that into HTML5 (with Hyphenator.js, Google Web Fonts API, or Typekit and put some thought into designing your CSS.) while also producing a PDF-file with TeX (for printing purposes). And then on your document-view page, show a link to that PDF-file.

To assist in some of the above, there is a program called Pandoc.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] What are the Open source WYSIWYG Independent Web Equation Editors available on LaTeX/MathML

I was looking for something similar and came across this question. Then I was excited to find Mathquill, via the Wikipedia page on formula editors.

I've used a bunch of different formula editors, from MS Equation Editor to Google Docs' to LyX, and this is probably the most usable/fluid of all of them for simply banging out formulas. And it's web-based and GPL. This thing is much nicer than Google Docs' formula editor, at least.

Still leaves plenty of things to be desired, e.g. so far I've found: bolding, entering things like bra-kets, \hat, undo/redo history, mouse drag selection, etc. But I'm impressed by what's already in there. Anyway, it's just a few Javascript files, and on github.

[Tex/LaTex] Which editors can autocomplete any word from document

Any LaTeX editor can accommodate this style of auto-completion by means of macro definitions. It is probably the fastest way to perform this without having to switch from your existing editor to a new/different one. In my opinion, it is flexible, transferable and accommodates a host of variability that you may require based on (say) conditional support from LaTeX packages.

Since the replacement text is typically used inside regular text, the xspace package is of great help. It inserts a space after a command sequence only if it is followed by a space. This is a common issue with using command sequences in regular text. For example, A \TeX command sequence. will expand to A TeXcommand sequence. since the space represents the end of \TeX and is therefore gobbled. xspace is the way around this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xspace}% http://ctan.org/pkg/xspace
% Definitions for words to auto-complete
\newcommand{\sync}{synchrocyclotrons\xspace}%
%...
\begin{document}
What mighty \sync you have, sir! Get me one of those \sync.
\end{document}

enter image description here

If you change your mind (to quote ABBA), you can just change the macro definition. It would probably be the same amount of effort to do this than it would to modify the auto-completion segment provided by such an editor.

To go one step further, you can even define your macros to have (say) starred version * which expand to the plural form if use, otherwise it uses the singular form:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xparse}% http://ctan.org/pkg/xprase
\usepackage{xspace}% http://ctan.org/pkg/xspace
% Definitions for words to auto-complete
\NewDocumentCommand{\sync}{s}{%
  synchrocyclotron\IfBooleanTF{#1}{s}{}\xspace
}
%...
\begin{document}
That's a huge \sync! There are plenty more \sync* over there.
\end{document}

enter image description here

The xparse package provides an easy interface for working with starred versions of commands/environments.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] What are the Open source WYSIWYG Independent Web Equation Editors available on LaTeX/MathML

[Tex/LaTex] Which editors can autocomplete any word from document

Related Question