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  What are some good online LaTeX editors?

+ 1 like - 0 dislike
1960 views

I currently use ShareLaTeX as my primary LaTeX editor, but I'm planning to switch to something like WriteLaTeX (now Overleaf). My main concern is that ShareLaTeX is extremely slow and laggy when recompiling, ever since the last UI redesign, while WriteLaTeX is zippy fast and responsive (and has a lot of nice features).

However, I'm slightly afraid of privacy concerns with transferring my documents to WriteLaTeX - I'm not a privacy freak by any measure, but the lack of proper access control is somewhat disturbing to me.

So my question is: what LaTeX editor do you use, and why? I'm mostly interested in the online editors, but others would be interesting too.

Some features I'm interested in:

  • Rendering speed
  • Proper access control for manuscript sharing
  • Folderwise integration with cloud services like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox 
  • Online (cloud-based)
asked Feb 10, 2015 in Chat by dimension10 (1,985 points) [ revision history ]
edited Feb 14, 2015 by dimension10
P.S. I think this should be on-topic in chat, since all questions that are off-topic on the rest of the site, but of interest for physicists should be on-topic here. But feel free to vote to close if you disagree.
I use ShareLaTex, it works fine for me. I haven't heard of WriteLatex (Overleaf), though. I will try it.

By the way, what is your "privacy concern"? Are you afraid of stealing your content by the system or what?

P.S. For me, Overleaf works equally fast, but it does not have a ZOOM button.
@VladimirKalitvanski Not really - they have more than a million manuscripts on their system, that isn't ever going to be an issue. My concern is that the maximum level of view permission restriction is "anyone with a link", which means that anyone can see the manuscript if they see the link.
@dimension10: If you are the only author, nobody can learn the link to your manuscript.

"Anyone with a link" is apparently made on purpose to let co-authors from different places work fast together.

@VladimirKalitvianski The URL is visible for anybody behind you. (don't give me the password argument, passwords aren't visible after I enter them.)

It isn't a feature, because you can share it with specific people. The paid version does it better.

Looks like Microsoft might be including a latex editor in their office suit: https://windows.uservoice.com/forums/265757-windows-feature-suggestions/suggestions/6977596-introduce-modern-latex-editor-into-microsoft-offic#comments

It's the second most upvoted entry on Microsoft Office Uservoice.

@dimension10: "The URL is visible for anybody behind you".

I am not going to defend this "feature". It may indeed cause discomfort for a user.

1 Answer

+ 1 like - 0 dislike

CoCalc has a LaTeX editor, which is quite feature complete for most purposes. It also gives you a full Linux environment, where you can work with git and so on. You could even run some code to automatically generate some parts of your document right there.

answered May 6, 2018 by ha_sch (0 points) [ no revision ]

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