If you like LaTeX, the cloud and Scribtex you might find the Online LaTeX Editor – available at http://www.verbosus.com – interesting. It’s also a browser based LaTeX (and Octave btw) Editor that allows you to generate and preview the PDF on the same page. It provides additional features like code completion and code merging when sharing a project.

Maybe worth a try.

@ James:

Wow, thanks! I’m glad you liked the review. Very awesome to see someone from a the project you reviewed come and say hi. :)

And you are right, the differences are probably version mismatch. Thanks!

@ Ben:

Yup, you are right – like James said above, it is probably a version thing.

Thank you for bringing up ScribTeX in a post a couple week(s?) back, that’s the first time I had heard about it. I finally got around to trying it this past weekend, and I really like it. It beats trying to remove unused packages from TeXLive on my thumb drive.

I guess you could call it poor man’s version control, but it actually uses git for the version control with the limitation that you only get the master branch. So I use git to sync between work and home. While I am more familiar and comfortable with subversion I think I see some advantages of using git for this particular service.

As to why the pages might be different the first thing I thought of is that you can specify some defaults which might be different between your install and ScribTex. I think paper size (A4 vs letterpaper) and font size (10pt, 11pt, or 12pt) both have a customizable default.

Hi Luke, I’m the founder of ScribTeX and I just wanted to say thanks for the fantastic write up. It looks like you’ve had a good play with the service and have understood what we’re trying to do. To address you’re two concluding points:

1) Off output: We’re using TexLive 2009 in almost exactly the same way it would be used on your desktop. Any discrepancy in the output will only be as a result of minor variations in different versions of LaTeX. There shouldn’t be any big noticeable changes to your document.

2) Pricing: We totally agree with your remarks! We’re currently considering how to restructuring our pricing to best suit users. We’d like to offer more with the free personal plan and then encourage people to sign up for paid plans to collaborate. We want to become the best LaTeX editor out there so don’t want to limit people unnecessarily!

We’re also in the process of rolling out a much better editor that is more like the IDEs you mentioned. We’ll make sure to keep robust version control as a core feature though!

Thanks again for the write up,
James