Amazingly functional site for working with Latex documents! For example, I am working on screencast re: containers/docker right now, and created several diagrams using their editor, see: http://i.imgur.com/NlYuaXp.png

If this type of stuff interests you, make sure you check out http://texample.net/tikz/examples/all/ & http://tex.stackexchange.com too. Also, if you want to try and play around with it, use the "Create A New Paper" link @ https://www.writelatex.com/docs?template=paper

Here's the code I'm using:

  \documentclass[12pt]{article}
  \usepackage{tikz}
  \usepackage{verbatim}
  \usetikzlibrary{positioning}
  \begin{document}
  \pagestyle{empty}

  \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=.9,every node/.style={minimum size=1cm},on grid]
           
      \begin{scope}[
              yshift=-83,every node/.append style={
              yslant=0.5,xslant=-1},yslant=0.5,xslant=-1
              ]

          \fill[white,fill opacity=.9] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
          \draw[black,very thick] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
      \end{scope}
       
      \begin{scope}[
          yshift=0,every node/.append style={
              yslant=0.5,xslant=-1},yslant=0.5,xslant=-1
                         ]
          \fill[white,fill opacity=.9] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
          \draw[black,very thick] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
    \end{scope}
       
    \begin{scope}[
        yshift=90,every node/.append style={
        yslant=0.5,xslant=-1},yslant=0.5,xslant=-1
                         ]
        \fill[white,fill opacity=0.9] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
        \draw[black,dashed] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
    \end{scope}
       
    \draw[-latex,thick] (6.2,2) node[right]{$\mathsf{Web\ Server}$}
         to[out=180,in=90] (3,2);
    \draw[-latex,thick](5.9,5)node[right]{$\mathsf{Your\ App}$}
        to[out=180,in=90] (2,5);
    \draw[-latex,thick,red](4.3,-1.9)node[right]{$\mathsf{rootfs}$}
        to[out=180,in=90] (2,-.5);

  \end{tikzpicture}

  \end{document}

I am a little confused. Did you use a tikz editor/assistant that they have? Or did you type your tikz just like you would with ed/vim/emacs? I did not see anything that would assist with creating tikz illustrations when I was poking around. Lowering the tikz bar would be awesome.

Amazing additions, to bad it's not open source like ShareLatex. Will probably use this when working with none techsavy people.

Shameless plug: Do you need generated LaTeX documents, or just partial pieces, like tables and plots. In that case PyLaTeX[0] is probably worth looking at.

0. https://github.com/JelteF/PyLaTeX

There's also support for latex in plots via matplotlib[1].

[1]:http://matplotlib.org/users/usetex.html

Sounds like a good addition, but the big problem I've had with matplotlib is that the defaults are really terrible. The defaults of PGFplots are way better.

The Sage Cloud also had great support for Latex, with much of the same functionality as WriteLatex. http://cloud.sagemath.com

More details: http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2013/08/latex-in-cloud.html

The site is way impressive. I recently produce a resume using it. One of the best features I didn't see mentioned was the fact that it either stores everything locally or in such a way that a local cookie identifies you uniquely to the server, even if you are not logged in. So if your computer happens to shutdown during editing, or if you close the tab, or whatever, returning to the website will drop you in right where you left off. The only complaint I had was the delay on auto-updating, but the manual updating was more then sufficient.

I remember seeing a UNIX Motif application capable of live editing back in 1999 (way better than Lyx), when visiting a professor on my university.

Somehow they never became widespread.

Actually recommended this site to my Discrete Math students last Fall (this and sharelatex). They seemed to like it a lot.

I was thinking about why this didn't exist already, just days ago. Great way to start playing with Latex.

If they could support "track changes" like MSWord, I know a publisher that would die for this.

There's a version of track changes available in "compare" mode (see https://www.writelatex.com/blog/154-a-first-look-at-the-new-... for details), and we'll be releasing a further update to this in the near future.

It complained about a Swedish character ('ä') and errored out for me.

Locally I use TeXWorks with the XeLaTeX "output" and it handles it fine...

If you click on the gear icon and go to Advanced Build Options, you can turn on XeLaTeX.

It's also worth noting that you can use accented characters with pdflatex: adding \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} at the top of your preamble will usually do the job.

If none of that helps, feel free to send us the link to the doc via https://www.writelatex.com/contact and we will have a look.

EDIT: english

I personally hold the opinion that XeLaTeX should be the default anyway, e.g. Texpad app (iOS/Mac) already does this. I don't know of any downsides to choosing XeLaTeX over LaTeX.

I'd also like to see XeLaTeX become the default, but unfortunately there are still a lot of old documents and journal templates that are not compatible.

In the mean time, we try to auto-detect which engine to use, so if you load the fontspec package, for example, we'll automatically use XeLaTeX.

Why do you prefer xelatex to lualatex?

Simply never used lualatex. Should I be?

Thanks a bunch.

not support chinese

Some LaTeX incantations are required, but we do support Chinese. Here's an example of one way to set it up:

https://www.writelatex.com/examples/chinese-a-visit-to-qiant...