HN Reader

This could be useful for undergrads getting their feet wet with LaTeX and the world of publishing. However, I'm very skeptical that the options are broad enough to conform to the exacting style guidelines typical of PhD theses. Usually people use a template from their school which already formats everything, autogenerates the table of contents, etc.

In fact it isn't clear what this system offers over a LaTeX document started from a template and hosted privately on GitHub. The CI pipeline can even be set up to compile the document for the people who want to be able to do everything in a web browser.

Where are the customer testimonials or the samples to play with?

There also needs to be an 'about' page, to explain what the motivation is.

Given the AI invasion, isn't this a product category that has to either provide AI or have a stance against it?

Some work needs to go into how this is marketed and sold. Compare with how a JetBrains IDE is sold, plus what the pricing is.

previous:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21994655 6 years ago, 27 comments

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31491709 3 years ago, 17 comments

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40112169 1 year ago, 30 comments

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317242 4 months ago, 50 comments

Have you ported the USENIX or ACM paper templates?

I dont see how you can claim to be useful for scientific documents if you don’t handle the standard publication templates.

Bookmarked. I have a collection of tools now along these lines. Getting ahead without even trying.

Top atuff

My two cents:

1. Clean up the formatting of the page a bit, it seems a bit choppy along the edges, especially for the visuals (at least as viewed on a laptop).

2. Refine the content for the selling points about what it offers. It's grammatically awkward and wooden. Neither is a good idea in sales copy, especially in a service designed to help writers.

Other than that, looks pretty good, and good luck.

I see the idea, but you're competing with Microsoft Word and Overleaf for non-techies, and LaTeX/Typst for techies, and that sounds like a losing battle on both fronts. Non-techies want something familiar that they already know how to use, like Word, just with bib and their university's template. Techies probably don't want a cloud only service for a mostly solved problem. I don't see the value as a techie, and I don't see why I wouldn't just use my University's Word template from a non-techies view.

Looks elegant, but make sure to really focus on the specific pain point you think you need to address rather then the generic one of "LaTeX is hard".

Optimize for that very strongly, or else you'll be a solid 60% of everything (after years of effort...) but you won't ever get the critical mass of switchers. Whereas being 95% for one thing almost guarantees you'll get the people whose problem you solve thoroughly.

For example, and not to toot my own horn, I wrote some notes for people who have only ever used Word and need just enough LaTeX to understand how to get started[0]. Nothing more.

https://sgurungp.github.io/2024/08/14/LaTeX-for-Word-users-p...

I need a platform for legalese. Drafting documents. I do hope AI scribe agent emerges soon tho. "Hey scribus, write me a mark down document and provide links for the usual popular file formats, docx, pdf, Json. Extract metadata from context, format headers and footers and other using statutory instrument standard format. I will dictate content and you research, verify and amplify in my usual writing style"

If you cannot even describe your “platform” without proper grammar…especially one that’s supposed to be about “writing”…

:shrug:

This kind of service could be very useful since documents can be output in different formats or reformatted simply. I'm searching for a replacement for Word that can handle custom header levels/paragraph numberings in a really simple way. I write a lot of municipal code and would really like to find a tool that provides Word-level headings/numberings and can handle collaborative work in a simpler format. This might be the ticket.

There's zero chance in any universe that I would write my thesis in a cloud app. I would prefer pure notepad on windows 3.1 if that were the alternative.

I appreciate the idea.

But I would advise any and every student against risking their academic work product on a small webservice because the long term economic viability of such services tends to be low.

So the risk of all a student's work disappearing overnight far outweighs the benefits because the tool is not going to cut a five year program into six months. Good luck.

Previous HN post in 2024 (30 comments):

Show HN: MonsterWriter – Write a thesis, post, or organize notes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40112169

Third sentence needs some correction:

"MonsterWriter assists students write exceptional academic papers"

should be

"MonsterWriter assists students to write exceptional academic papers"

or "helps students write..."

s/build/built/