UKC

I would like to start to use LaTeX again and wonder if anyone could offer advice on the best way to go about it.

Specifically, does anyone know whether Latex Lab would be fine? I have come across it today and it looks okay. It is attractive since it uses Google Docs, which I use a lot. I have tried it out and it sort of works, but I can't find much documentation on it.

On the other hand, can I use MikTex from the cloud?

I would like some thing that enables me to access files from any machine.

I did use LaTeX fully, long ago, but haven't for ages, although I use it regularly for doing equations within Moodle. I am fed up with the terrible editing within Moodle, and want to go back to having the typesetting done well for me.

In reply to mbh:


I am writing my PhD thesis in LaTeX, as I use GitHub already, I just use that for my LaTeX source. Effective access to it from any location, you can easily sync your source between machines and you have version control as well.

Here are some thoughts on how to get the most out of it:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6188780/git-latex-workflow

Of course if you don't already use git there may be quite an overhead in learning how to use that effectively, but if you have got your head round LaTeX it shouldn't pose you any problems. Personally I find it a really useful version control/backup tool for any number of projects.

In reply to mbh:
Sharelatex may be worth a look - https://www.sharelatex.com/. It's an on-line LaTeX editor which is very easy to use and you can edit a document from any machine connected to the internet. In fact several people can edit the same document simultaneously and it's also possible to revert to historic versions if someone messes up!

In reply to mbh:

I used LaTeX Lab last year when I was writing up my masters thesis. I usually just write LaTeX in vim at the command line (because I am a masochist!) but I wanted a platform to share it with my supervisors and it worked fine for that.

I am not sure what documentation you are looking for though. There is a link to a wiki at the top of the page which seems to be the sum of the documentation, but I didn't come across anything I wanted to do that wasn't obvious from clicking through the menus. What do you mean by "it sort of works"? I might be able to help more if you are more specific about what you can't get to work.

In reply to Quiddity:





This is my more normal approach when I don't have to share my source with other people who don't know how to use Git - however the disadvantage is that you have to be working at a machine that has a compiler installed if you want to compile your source. ShareLatex and Latex Lab both have compilers built in so this isn't a problem.

An alternative approach if you don't need a built-in compiler and don't want to use Github is to just write your source in a good text editor and save it to Dropbox or some other cloud drive.

In reply to kathrync:

The easiest way?

linux and use the texlive distro. Use pdflatex rather than latex to compile your doc and it goes straight to pdf which is nice. Some in my place use kile or kate setup to do it all in an integrated way but I use vi to edit the source others use texmaker and gummi which have live compilation which is quite cool.

In reply to mbh:

Another vote for sharelatex.com, I used it to write my masters thesis and it worked a charm.

Far more convenient than a local installation with very few limitations on what you can do (as far as I could tell anyway). Inserting images, using bibtex etc. all works exactly as you'd expect. I didn't make much use of the collaborative editing features but they worked for my limited purposes.

In reply to mbh:
Thanks all for these helpful responses. I hope I can make the most of them.

I am not sure what GitHub is, so will look into it.

I like the idea of something that doesn't require a local installation (can be a problem at work), or to have a particular file structure set up, so Latex Lab and Sharelatex are what I will try first.


When I said "it sort of works", about Latex Lab, I meant that I tried the first few examples from here

get-software.net/info/first-latex-doc/first-latex-doc.pdf

but the label bit didn't work - it just got rendered as ?? instead of "as we see from the example on page two" etc

I'll work it out though, no doubt.

Thanks again.

In reply to mbh:




Worth noting that this is a well known issue in pretty much every installation of LaTex, the fix is to just render the file twice in a row (i.e. hit render then hit render again once the first one's finished). No idea what the cause is or why it hasn't been fixed in the many years it's been around.

In reply to remus:

I did that but it made no difference. Jeff Hefferon's article, to which I gave a link, mentions that a label file is generated, but I don't see one. I've only given it a few minutes of trying, so I'll try some more to get it to work.

In reply to remus:


Agreed - this is a bug in LaTeX, rather than something specific to Latex Lab. The usual solution is to compile twice. You sometimes see similar issues if you are adding citations and the solution is the same.

In reply to remus:

It's not a bug as such but to do with the way figure(etc) numbering works. The first run produces all the figure numbers and puts them in one of the output files. Until these are available it can't do cross references as it doesn't know the number of the figure being referenced. Sometimes three runs are needed.

In reply to MG:

I just tried this labelling thing again in Latex Lab, and it worked first time. Don't know why it didn't yesterday. All that I see saved to my Google Drive is the source document, in the same file format as for any other word processed document. I don't see any other output files, which is fine, unless I need to see them for some reason.

This looks very good, but Sharelatex seems just as good and looks like a more polished environment so I think I will start with that.

In reply to kathrync:

It's not a bug, it's a feature :P

If you are doing bibtex or similar, it is often necessary to run latex, then bibtex, then latex again - it is just necessary.

On linux/texlive, the script you want is latexmk, which does all of this for you (it keeps rerunning stuff until it is done).

In reply to mbh:



Almost certainly not. I'm not familiar with Latex Lab (I just use emacs and the command line) but in the background somewhere maybe it is doing multiple runs. Watch it though - it's embarrassing if all your reference number are wrong (I hear!!).

In reply to andrewmcleod:





I'll make a note of that - thanks. I usually just run latex, then bibtex, then latex again as you said, but the latexmk command sounds like a useful shortcut!

And yeah - I guess it is a feature but it's a silly one so it fits in the bug category in my head

In reply to kathrync:

pdflatex is useful too if you haven't discovered it.

In reply to mbh:

Git is a version control system, similar to RCS/SVN/CVS (pedants, note that I know it's really quite different, but for simple explanation purposes, they're all VCS).

GitHub - http://www.github.com is a online Git repository which you can host your files on.

I've only ever used vim and texlive on Linux, so can't really help with the nice GUI stuff and the web only stuff.

In reply to MG:


Yeah, I know about that one. Thanks!

In reply to mbh:

Hg IMHO is a bit easier to use than git, the github equiv is bitbucket.com. tortoisehg is a pretty good windows client.

It's worth learning a bit about whatever toolset you use. A little upfront learning can save lots of time in the longer run. If you're familiar with Linux a VPS would work well. Running a web server would make sharing easy, accessible from anywhere, trivial to install software on.